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"Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning." (Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, Apocalypse Now). These iconic words, uttered in an iconic film inspired by an iconic novel, invite us to think of the smell of war as a pleasurable experience, indeed, a joy. But what about the mere joy of watching a film, listening to music, viewing a painting or reading a poem about war? In this First-Year Seminar, we will ask ourselves what is the place of war in our cultural imagination? What attracts us to the “heart of darkness” and how and why does popular culture make this violent experience aesthetically pleasurable? We will cover various media, such as films, television shows, visual art, music and literature from various countries in an attempt to answer these questions and others. The seminar eschews a chronological approach organized around major historical wars in favor of a conceptual framework. As we will see, the creative impulse extends far beyond the representation of historical and particular events reaching deep into the realms of memory and trauma, hate and love, heroism and fear, cruelty and empathy. We will discuss the author/ filmmaker/ artist’s perspectives and methods and will engage in questions of ethics and moral choices in relation to the cultural artifacts we examine. Our main focus will be modern representations of war, but we will also discuss earlier periods and cultures for the sake of comparison. For projects, students will have the option to choose their topics, works, media and format (analytical paper, creative writing, a short documentary, creative film or a short podcast).