About Me

Hello! My name is Jennifer and I am currently a freshman Cognitive Sciences major at the University of California, Irvine. This year, I am taking Humanities Core, a three-quarter-long sequence that explores aspects of war from different academic disciplines, such as literature, philosophy, and art history. The primary purpose of my blog, created for this class, is to examine war from the perspective of the common people. When studying war from an objective point of view, such as in history class, it is hard to comprehend the magnitude at which war affects its victims. When war is subjectively presented to us, it uses either:

• History from above. Most evident in the media’s romanticizing of war heroes and drawing upon national pride, similar to what was done in Homer’s Iliad. Plays a large role in desensitizing the general population to the cruelties of war.
• History from below. Tends to focus on how war affects those who are indirectly involved, such as poor families in a war zone, as in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage. Also focuses on unromanticized portrayals of soldiers’ wartime experiences. Enables people to develop a more realistic, negative opinion about war through its use of pathos.

I was inspired to dedicate my blog to examining war from the perspective of the common people after reading Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus, which brilliantly captures a view of history from below. Unlike detached, hyper-masculine war clichés often present in the media, describing the experiences of war victims makes it more likely that the audience will sympathize with them and realize the atrocities of war.