This course is offered in the Global Citizens stream of UBC’s Coordinated Arts Program. It combines the study of literature and culture with the study of methods of academic research and writing. We explore the relationships among literature, the self, the nation, and the world as we encounter poetry, novels, non-fiction, and graphic narratives that produce and question the memories of the events they record. We will be reading texts that convey personal experiences of various historical events (for example, the Iran/Iraq war, World War Two, the “War on Terror”). Through these texts, we will question who “owns” histories and memories. What happens when stories are told across racial or national identifications? Should we only speak for ourselves, or must we also speak for others? Do people or nations have rights to the stories they tell and/or obligations to the national identities those stories produce? How are events in disparate places connected in our “globalized” world?