Fall 2008

Professor Mark Sanders

V29.0844, V18.0839

Intro to African Literature: War Stories: Child Soldiers in Fiction and Autobiography

Over the past twenty years, child soldiers—defined as combatants under the age of fifteen—have been widely mobilized in wars in Africa and elsewhere. In many cases, child soldiers have committed terrible atrocities. Increasingly the child soldier is emerging as an important figure in African fiction and autobiographical writing. In this course, we will be reading novels primarily by African writers such as Nuruddin Farah, Ahmadou Kourouma, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and testaments by Ishmael Beah and other former child soldiers. We will read these works in comparison with works by German writer Günter Grass and other authors from outside of Africa, and draw on writings in human rights and psychoanalytic theory in order to understand their writings. We will be guided by, among other questions, the following: How is the child soldier represented in these works? What differences are there between the representation of child soldiers in novels and in autobiography? How do different writers explain how a child can become a killer? And how do these writers address the question of the ethical responsibility of child soldiers for what they did?