Wednesday, March 26, 2008
The Fiction/Word group has read a number of materials focusing on different regions involving children and armed conflict. These regions range from current war zones like Sierra Leone to historical conflicts like World War II that included children. The presentation will begin with an introduction of the three main themes, before discussing the difficulty of imagining the horrors these children faced, using examples from the text. We will then discuss the ability of fiction in these situations. Can it accurately assess war? How does it deal with deception? Is literature calling us to action? After addressing these issues, the presentation will move towards discussing the three key ideas: selfhood as perceived by the child soldier, experiences of a child soldier in relation to society such as the destruction of the family unit or status, and the idea of power in relation to both the child involved and the conflict. Each of these key ideas will use a number of sources as well as external material such as video clips and art in order to highlight the main themes.
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We will examine how children and war are represented in textual form. We will begin our presentation with an exploration of the word itself, and an examination of authorship. What is the relationship between language and what it describes? How does the author inherently cater to an audience, perhaps, at the expense of what or whom they are describing? What are the implications for poststructuralist theory for anthropological inquiry using texts? After acknowledging the shortcomings of textual analysis, we will proceed to examine several texts originating from various regions of the world, which depict childhood, war, and the explicit involvement of children and youth in war. We will examine themes that we have recognized throughout the texts, such as the relationship between lies and fiction, the nature of literature (what does it do and not do?), lack of access to texts (perhaps due to blocks of imagination), our own inherent biases toward certain texts (why are we attracted to autobiographies?), and the implications for society resulting from these texts (what are we compelled to do).
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