135812 SE War and/of Literature: Stendhal - Lev Tolstoj - Stephen Crane - Joseph Conrad (2023S)

The revolution in the depiction of war in the 19th century went hand in hand with a revolution in narrative methods, which directly resulted in the emergence of modern storytelling: inner monologue, slow-motion technique, stream of consciousness, multiple perspectives and, above all, the development of alienation techniques as a central achievement of perception -realism.
In Lev Tolstoy's epoch-making novel War and Peace (1863/1868) these techniques are consistently introduced in the famous battle scenes for the first time, but also expanded to a genuine novel poetics that goes far beyond the mere depiction of combat operations. The best way to appreciate the radical nature of this narrative warfare technique is to compare Tolstoy's novel with Stendhal's portrayal of the Battle of Waterloo in his novel The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) - a pretext that was and was relevant to Tolstoy - despite all differences – valued highly.
Stephen Crane's short novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895) was required reading in Anglo-Saxon schools for decades and is undoubtedly the first American (civil) war depiction to have long been part of world literature. In this case, too, it is about a revolutionary interior depiction, but also about the de-heroization of war scenes, which shifts the fight from the outer battlefield to that of the inner world of a (youthful) hero who - similar to Stendhal and Tolstoy - takes part in the events unprotected senses and therefore in all its absurd cruelty and panic. A wonderful monograph on Crane was recently published by Paul Auster (Burning Boy / In Flammen, 2022), in which this Civil War novel takes pride of place.
It is also no coincidence that Stephen Crane lived and wrote in exile in England in the last years of his life in close friendship and neighborhood with Joseph Conrad.
He wrote a whole series of novels in which war – including colonial war – plays a central role: in addition to Lord Jim and The Rover, we are particularly interested in his classic Heart of Darkness (1899/1902). In Conrad, the narrative battle scenes established by the three other authors reach a radical expansion into an almost intangible atmosphere of fear and panic, which is congenially made into a film by Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979).
In terms of methodology, this seminar is about the historical reconstruction of the respective works in the context of their context and, above all, about the development of a general aesthetics or poetics of the depiction of war (in the context of the realism of the 19th and early 20th centuries). All of this with a view on the (inter)mediality of war aesthetics.