The Reverberations of World War II Syllabus

Since childhood, I’d been fed the constant patriotic narrative of World War II, imbibing the events in which the United States had direct involvement from Pearl Harbor to D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge and more. I never really veered from those stories until I started looking deeper into World War II a few years ago, specifically the connections between Jim Crow and the Holocaust. This led me to start reading non-American narratives of the war, specifically European writers who wrote either during or after the war. When I did this, I knew I wanted to teach a world literature course focused on these authors and texts. Here is the syllabus for the course I am teaching this fall. Maybe I will expand this course at some point, but for right now, I had to limit it to on;y about five novels. I would love to hear your suggestions for other texts in the comments below.

Course Overview:

When you think about World War II what do you think about? Pearl Harbor? D-Day? The Battle of the Bulge? Iwo Jima? Midway? Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The Holocaust? The internment of Japanese Americans? These events center on the United States and our involvement in the war; however, World War II, as the name implies, was a global conflict with far-reaching geo-political impacts that lasted well beyond the fighting. In this course, we will read literature from German…