Scribner Seminar Program
Course Description

shocked: World War I and Modern culture

Instructor(s): Timothy Wientzen, English

An examination of World War I and its relationship to modern culture.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, humanity was improving in every measurable way. Technology was laying the groundwork for a new century of increased liberties and opportunities, aristocratic privileges were on the wane, and people lived longer, more dignified lives than ever before. Yet by the second decade of the century, the promises of the modern world were challenged by the sudden eruption of the First World War, which saw death on a scale never before fathomed.

This Scribner Seminar returns students to the First World War to understand it as a historical phenomenon, but also as a cultural one. Students will engage with a wide variety of writing and art from and about the period, including documentary, film, poetry, painting, fiction, and history. Students will study some of the ways in which the first “modern” war configured our sense of what modernity is, and how it shifted traditional notions of consciousness, technology, gender, and the future itself. Ultimately, this course will ask what we can learn about life in the twenty-first century by returning to the cataclysmic inauguration of the modern era.