HONORS 250 HUMANITIES

ETHICAL THINKING IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

Instructor:                  Nick Hayes, Ph.D.

                                    Professor of History and University Chair in Critical Thinking

                                    QUAD  451-A

                                    Tele. 363-2623 Fax 363-3300 or 2514

                                    E-mail:  nhayes@csbsju.edu

Our class aims to shape an intellectual community centered around ethical thinking on the global issues of our times and fashioned as a community of both the mind and place. Our evenings will be devoted to the art of serious, intellectual conversations or colloquies in the classical humanist tradition.  In the process, we will work together to facilitate the emergence of each participant as a mentor and to find his or her individual voice in addressing the issues raised in our conversations.

Our core content draws upon three common resources—texts, films, and guest presentations. We first of all, structure a series of conversations around six authors. The authors and their books in order of our assigned readings are:

Tim O’Brien, The Things they Carried (Broadway Books)

Andrei Maxine, Dreams of My Russian Summers

            J.M.Coetzee, Disgrace (Penguin Paperback)

Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our      Families:  Stories From Rwanda (Picador USA Paperback)

Abraham Verghese, My Own Country (Vintage Paperback)

Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (South End Press/Paperback)

Secondly, we will screen three films to complement themes in our discussions:  Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965), Michel Cimino’s The Deer Hunter  (1978), and Nikita Mikhalov’s  Burnt by the Sun(1995). Finally, we will have a series of guest presentations throughout the term:  Saint John’s Abbey, Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, and Richard Bresnahan of Saint John ’s Pottery, Terry Wolkerstorfer, former AP Foreign Correspondent, and Fred de Sam Lazaro, Correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Our specific course requirements for each student will consist of:

• Group discussion:  We will divide the class into six working groups of four students who in turn will take the responsibility for leading the discussion of one the conversation topics.  The group will take the responsibility to review the discussion notes for its topic and delegate among its members the evening’s discussion of the points presented in the notes.  However, the group will also submit its revised and edited version of discussion notes for the topic that will be posted on the public folder for the course.  It will be the responsibility of the group to have posted on our public folder its revised discussion notes and supplementary discussion materials on the public folder.  The participation in the group discussion will be evaluated at 15% for the group as a whole and 15% for each individual contribution.
• Short Essays.  Students will submit six short essays that focus on their analysis of the key ethical issues posed by the authors of their texts.  The first assignment on memory and the events of 9/11 will be common to all students.  However, students will be exempt from the short essay on the particular author and topic covered by their participation in one of the group discussions.
• Personal Essay.  Each student will develop a personal essay that reflects on a key ethical issue raised in one or more of the course conversation topics.  The essay will be approximately 2000 words in length and count toward 25% of the grade.
•  Oral presentation.  Each student will present an individual or a collaborative oral presentation on the key theme of his or her personal essay.  The oral presentation will count toward 25% of the course grade.

Our class will have two web pages for posting course materials and comments for discussion.  There will be a public folder at Public Folder/History/Hayes and a web page at http://www.scsbsju.edu/criticalthinking/honors.

Conversation I:

9/11 and the Politics of Memory

What do you remember from the events of 9/11?

Start with three steps.  First of all, take a few moments to write down as accurately as you can recall your immediate impressions of the events of 9/11.  Then reflect on how subsequent representations of those events might have re-enforced certain images and substitute later media images for the original images in your mind. Finally, looking back, later, how has your memory of those events been shaped by their politicization in terms of the subsequent war on terrorism?

For a perspective from outside the U.S., read Arundhati Roy’s “The Algebra of Infinite Justice” (Roy, 105-24).  You may access the article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive and ample background on her on the web. Drawing from the first three steps indicated above and from Roy’s essay, write a brief essay on the ethical issues inherent in the representation of the events of 9/11.  In your essay, focus on what you recall as the most poignant memories of the events?  How has that memory been politicized in your mind and the popular mind?  Finally, reflecting on Roy’s essay, what are the key ethical issues involved in the events of 9/11 and our subsequent response. 

Be prepared in class to draw a distinction between what you actually remembered from your personal experience on 9/11 and what the media, political culture or other factors might have subsequently influenced your memory.

Your essay should be approximately 250/300 words, double-spaced and formatted for Microsoft Word or other appropriate software.  The essay is due in class, 1/15.  If you choose, you may later revise this short essay into your essay assignment on Arundhati Roy. It represents 5% of your course grade. 

Honors 250 Roy 1

Conversation II:

The Battle of Algiers

Throughout of conversations, we will frequently turn to film as another perspective on our topics. Our first exercise in thinking in film will be the viewing of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965).   As you view the film, reflect upon two issues of its historical context—What might have prompted Pontecorvo to release this film in 1965? The Battle of Algiers in a new and uncut version was the hit of this year’s New York Film Festival. What also accounts for its recent re-discovery and popularity? 

As you view the film, keep in mind of view key points:

• Although Pontecorvo belonged to the European left (he was a member of the Italian Communist Party), he argued for the film’s objectivity and denied that his work took any side in the conflict.
• The film is a masterpiece of the early French technique of cinema verite.  Pontecorvo’s cast, for example, combines professionals, amateur walk -ons, and actual residents of the city. Pontecorvo emphatically denied that any part of the film contained newsreel footage.
• The film focuses on the crucial years in the French-Algerian Conflict of 1954-57 when the Algerian Resistance mounted fierce insurrections against the French who in turn responded with an escalation of the tactics of the paratroopers.
• The version you view that was distributed to the United States and France edited out the film’s most brutal torture and reprisal scenes.

In the words of the British critic, Derek Malcolm, The Battle of Algiers is a “model of how, without prejudice or compromise, a film-maker can illuminate history and tell us how we repeat the same mistakes.”  For the sake of our conversation, let us begin by reflecting on how the film might provide a clue to today’s French and European attitudes to the American war in Iraq.  What does the film suggest about the European memory that might be by comparison absent in the American memory?

Conversation  III

The Vietnam War Remembered:

Our second discussion brings us to address the memory of the Vietnam War within American political culture.  For general background to the war, we will begin with a visit to a web page prepared by Minnesota Public Radio. The year 2000 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary FO the end of the Vietnam War.   In conjunction with the anniversary, American Radio Works (the national documentary unit of Minnesota Public Radio in cooperation with National Public Radio) produced and broadcast a special series and web site Revisiting Vietnam.     You may access the program, its web site, and continuing “chat rooms” at  

http://www.mpr.americanradioworks.org/features/vietnam/index.html

For class, visit the web site, listen to the first part of the series “History and Reconciliation,” and then visit the Vietnam Scrapbook.

            Ask yourself why has the legacy of that war been so troubled and so difficult for our society to recognize or understand.   How does the memory of Vietnam differ from the memory of WWII?   Perhaps, the veteran memories of Vietnam are more analogous to what we studied in terms of the “lost generation” and its memories of WWI?      Looking at the Vietnam Scrapbook, what do you think prompted so many veterans to share their memories?  Pick what you feel are the most representative, poignant, or simply unforgettable contributions to the scrapbook.

Our main reading, moreover, for the Vietnam Era comes in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.  Be prepared to discuss the following issues from O’Brien’s novel:

• O’Brien plays with questions of the genre of this book.   Is it a memoir?  Fiction?  Which stories are literally retrospective narratives of actual events?  Which are re-interpreted?  For example, why does he provide different accounts of the deaths of Kiowa and Norman?  How are the accounts different?
• In this context, what are “the things they carried”?  In what contexts?  What did they “carry” in Vietnam?  What have they carried since Vietnam?
• Why did O’Brien eventually accept the induction order from the Draft Board and accept service in Vietnam?  Describe his thoughts and actions in the time between his receipt of the induction order and his decision to obey.   Doe he looks back with pride on this decision?
• In the opening story and the follow-up profiles of Lieutenant Cross, why does he take responsibility for the death of Lavender?  After this incident, what happens with his relationship with the girl friend back in New Jersey?   Years later, when he meets the former girl friend, she takes offense at “the things men do”?   What is the double meaning here?  The difference between her sense of the phrase and cross’s interpretation?
• What lies behind O’Brien’s depiction of the scene of shooting the water buffalo and the bizarre story of Mary Ann, the girl friend who visits the front?  Pay careful attention to the portrait of the young woman at the front? Why does she go over to the “Greenies”?  What has become of her when her boy friend finally visits her there?  Then, she goes “over to other side”?  In her story, what is O’Brien trying to convey of our capacity in wartime for evil?
• Focus on two deaths – Kiowa in the war and Norman after the war: What does Norman’s life and death back in Iowa signify?

We will also explore an example of the memory of Vietnam in film.  Over two class periods, we will view Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978). Read this study of the Vietnam era in film as a reflection of our theme “the wound that never heals.”   Reflect on the irony of one remark by the film character Linda (played by Meryl Streep):

Michael, you’re so weird.

   Linda (Meryl Streep) to Michael (Robert Di Niro)

In the case of The Deer Hunter, you observe the now iconic roles played by Robert Di Niro (Michael), Christopher Walkin (Nick), and Meryl Streep (Linda) that, on he one hand, depict standard genres in the literature of the war veteran (the naïve volunteer, the woman left behind, the soldier who can never go home again, etc.) and, on the other, combine into a composite portrait of a nation wounded.

            In the opening scenes of the film, pay careful attention to how Cimino places his characters in the social milieu of white, ethnic working class America.   In many respects, they represent much of the same types of “citizen soldiers” for the Vietnam era that Stephen Ambrose ascribed to the “We” generation of WWII.   What is the significance of the encounter with the Green Beret at the wedding scene? Above all else, how do you interpret the deer hunting scenes and Michael’s insistence on “just one shot”?

            The film also carries similarities to themes of Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried.   Consider the literal comparison to Lt. Cross’s photo of Martha and the photo of Linda (Meryl Streep) carried by Michael (Di Niro) and Nick (Walkin).  What does the photo symbolize?  Above all else, like The Things They Carried, The Deer Hunter conveys the burden of the soldier’s memory.   Compare, for example, how the burden of memory drives the character of Nick (Walkin) and Norman Bowker to self-destruction.

            The Deer Hunter also carries a definite political context.  From the opening scenes of sympathy of the Steel town world of the main characters, to the horrors of the war and their torture in Vietnam, and finally to the final, emotional scene at the local back in Pennsylvania, The Deer Hunter gives expression to the voice of a decent, working class America brutally victimized by the war in Vietnam.  Is there racism implied in the portraits of the Vietnamese? But ask yourself what political forms might these wounds take? 

Finally, following our discussion of O’Brien’s novel and the film, we will have a guest presentation by Terry Wolkerstorfer, a combat veteran of Vietnam and a former AP war correspondent in Vietnam, on his reflections on the experience of the war and the media’s coverage of the war.

For your short essay, write a reflective essay on what you regard as the key ethical issue raised in O’Brien’s The Things they Carried.    Also, connect that issue to an aspect of the materials on the MPR web page and the film The Deer Hunter.  Your essays should be 250/300 words, double-spaced word processed text and are due in class on 2/3.