In examining the history of imperialist ventures, Edward Said illuminates, “The struggle [over geography] is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.” Premised upon the incisive identification that the creative work variously parallels, encodes, coincides with, and contradicts the colonial enterprise, Said’s charge can also be productively extrapolated to clarify the experience of war and its accompanying forms of representation. After all, military incursions are geopolitical and ideological programs that likewise enact the occupation of both space and self; in a sense, like the colonial encounter that is its counterpart, war is a conversation—one of unimaginable destruction and brutality in intensity and magnitude. It follows, then, that we nominate war poetry as the focus of this pedagogical unit: as a creative testimony to lived, direct expressions of systemic violence, the war poem registers—if not accommodates—multiple positions and orientations within the same space, thus literally giving word to counter-narratives that confront ethically bankrupt hegemonic discourses that champion offensive action and endorse unnecessary cruelty.

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The formulation of a pedagogical unit centered on war poetry proceeds from this recognition of the war poem's inherently multivalent character to accomplish several objectives. On a fundamental level, foregrounding the topic of war sensitizes students to what is arguably one of the most central phenomena of the human experience, perhaps even more so in an increasingly transnational(ized) universe. We have thus arranged our literary texts chronologically to call attention to the continuity of and connections between occurrences of war. The pervasiveness of global conflicts in today’s world merely verifies the pertinence of war as a theme for our charges who stand to inherit this world; cognizance precedes change—and this change can only be effectuated by concerned citizens, of both nation and world, who embody a global outlook, as delineated in the Ministry of Education’s 21st Century Competencies framework.

 

Further, that we have included a selection of war poetry both canonical and non-canonical and both Anglophone and translated in an eight-lesson unit affords students a key critical reading strategy on which literary evaluation and ethical engagement converge: comparison. In orchestrating an intertextual and interdisciplinary dialog, we aspire to impart in our students an appreciation of and ability to critically respond to plural and often competing positions and frames of representations within and across texts from around the globe. Students who undertake this unit would exceed a reductive aggressor/victim binary that often delimits war rhetoric and develop a sense of pathos for the futility and devastation of global conflict. Our unit’s focus on the skill of comparison, then, coheres with several aims and desired student outcomes articulated in the 2013 Literature in English Teaching Syllabus—in particular, an enriched engagement with the world, a cogent ability to identify relationships between self, text, and world, a considered means of apprehending the text, an ability to confidently communicate personal and critical responses to texts, and an appreciation of texts across cultures and regions.

 

 

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Bibliography: 

 

Ministry of Education (Singapore). "21st Century Competencies," Ministry of Education (April 16, 2015). https://www.moe.gov.sg/education/education-system/21st-century-competencies (accessed October 21, 2016).

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Ministry of Education (Singapore). Literature in Education Teaching Syllabus 2013. Singapore: Ministry of Education, 2013.

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Raymond, Nicholas. "World Grunge Map." Freestock.CA. http://freestock.ca/flags_ maps_g80-world_grunge_map_sepia_p1729.html (accessed October 18, 2016). 

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Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York, NY: Vintage, 1994.

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