In what ways are texts produced during times of war (poems, paintings, films, political pamphlets, historical records, philosophical treatises, etc.) about war? The Collaborative Research Seminar On War and its Representations brought together faculty and graduate students from across departments and disciplines to address this question through their own distinct objects of study—objects that might or might not have been thought of as belonging to a culture of war. CRS participants explored the relationship between the shaping forces of war (and other protracted periods of depredation) and various social and cultural forms.

Questions considered during the seminar included: What does it mean to be about war? What representational, figural, or argumentative modes are included in the concept of aboutness, and what kinds of pressure does the fact of war put on them? In what way are texts proximate to—in or around, before, during, or after—war also necessarily about war even (perhaps especially) when they seem not to be? In what ways might the trace of war remain in texts that work to be about something else? The seminar participants approached these issues by analyzing pairs of texts: one directly representing some aspect of war or wartime alongside another doing so only obliquely, or seemingly not at all.