E-Mail: dan.hinmansmith@nic.bc.ca

Pablo Picasso, "Weeping Woman" (1937)

Leon Trotsky: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

• Tim O’Brien, Things They Carried (New York: Broadway, 1998).

• Art Spiegelman, Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale and Here My Troubles Began  (New York: Random House, 1996).

Walt Whitman:  "Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background . . . and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books."

Assignments And Evaluation

Journal                        75%

Milan Kundera:  "The struggle against power is the struggle of memory over forgetting."

The Journal:

The student journal is the main assignment in this class.  The purpose of the journal is to provide you the opportunity for frequent thoughtful, analytical and personal commentary upon course—related material.  The advantages of the journal, to my mind, are that it breaks work down into regular and manageable chunks, and that it enables you to seize hold of the curriculum in a way which reflects your own interests and style.  In order to give you a basic structure and to clearly communicate my expectations, I will specify certain mandated entries.  However,  you are encouraged to be imaginative in your probing of the complex connections between War, Memory, Myth and History.

The excellent journal will:

The above list of entries is meant as a firm guide rather than as an absolutely-everything-here must be completed.  The embedded tension within the assignment between structure and flexibility is deliberate.  Talk to me if you want to make some significant individual adjustments.  Do not hesitate to take risks and to express your own opinions.  Do think critically, though try not to succumb to the temptation to always write easy, stream-of-consciousness entries.  This is an assignment designed to encourage and to reward extensive student effort and learning.  The work-load is heavy but my expectation is that a good-faith approach to the course will lead to strong success.  You can include print-outs from the internet in the journal or quote passages but are expected, of course, to identify that which is not your own original work.  Formal footnoting is not required but plagiarized/cut-and-pasted material will likely lead to a failing grade for the course.  Likewise, you should not recycle any writings from other classes.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, (Seville) Spain, 1933

Helen Keller:  "I do not want the peace that passeth understanding.  I want the understanding that bringeth peace."

Class Participation:

Class discussion will be an important part of the course.  Lectures will be mixed with regular conversations about readings, videos and other curricular materials.  What other students get out of HIS 220 will be significantly influenced by the efforts you put into mini-presentations and other course preparation.

The class participation grade will be based upon attendance (I take attendance but only to make distinctions between those who attend very faithfully, regularly, and irregularly); the willingness to contribute thoughtfully to discussion and to listen carefully to fellow students; preparation for mini-presentations; and confirmation in the journal that one has kept up with the readings/research.

Grading in Humanities classes is always arbitrary.  In the case of class participation, these distinctions become all the more difficult to make.  In this course, those students who stand out through consistent contribution to full-class and small-group discussion will be rewarded with a top participation grade.  Those students in the middle who attend regularly but who, for whatever reason, do not get a chance to shine in class, will be graded on their written work alone (the 75% being pro-rated up to 100%).  Any students who have poor attendance and/or offer little evidence of being consistently prepared for mini-presentations will receive a low grade for this one important component of the course.

In other words, as long as you are involved in the course and making an attempt to add to the learning of your classmates, the participation grade can only help you and will in no circumstances be used to lower your overall grade.

Amy Tan:  "Memory feeds imagination."

W.H. Auden:  "To save your world you asked this man to die.  Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?"