Our State TV network has a two-part show on WWI: The Great War: first broadcast April 14 2007, and with the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau as one of the actors.
Vimy: Students arrive in France today.
Each will carry the memory of a Canadian soldier.
Tony Atherton, CanWest News ServicePublished: Tuesday,
April 03, 2007
OTTAWA -- On Easter Monday in northwest France, a crowd of 25,000 is expected to gather on the long, broad green in front of the Vimy Memorial. It may be the biggest gathering in the Douais region of Picardie since King Edward VIII dedicated the heart-stirring monument 71 years ago. That number of people, coincidentally, is the same as the number of Canadian soldiers who surged out of tunnels and trenches on April 9, 1917, and over the fortified ridge on which the memorial now stands ....
Beginning Wednesday, through newspaper stories, photographs and in their own online blogs, these six teenagers will let readers back home peek over their shoulders as they marvel at the sights of Paris and bow their heads over the graves of Flanders. As their journey progresses, each will strive to learn a little more about the soldier for whom their act of deliberate remembrance is a kind of living memorial.
Although it is not uncommon for big families to produce a rebel or two along with the chip-off-the-old-block offspring, there are few that can lay claim to as much dissension within the ranks as the aristocratic clan of Mitford. This gaggle of wayward sisters (six in all, with one brother, Tom, who was killed in combat in 1945 at the age of 36) included Diana, the family beauty, who married the dastardly Oswald Mosley, head of the British Fascist party; Nancy, the family wit, whose novel The Pursuit of Love kick-started the proliferation of novels, memoirs, and biographies that would come to be called the Mitford "industry"; and the family madwoman, Unity, who went bonkers for Adolf Hitler and put a pistol to her head when Britain declared war on Germany.
By Henry Samuel in Paris
An Englishwoman sacked for bringing her employers in Paris into disrepute by writing an internet diary under the pseudonym petite anglaise was awarded £30,000 for wrongful dismissal yesterday. a test case for bloggers in France and beyond, a tribunal concluded that Catherine Sanderson, whose blog is said by some to be the equivalent of "Bridget Jones in Paris", had been dismissed "without real and serious causes". >>more
By Richard Waters and Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Silicon Valley is abuzz over a new mini-blogging service for mobile phones that some predict will be a mass-market hit with the reach of a YouTube or MySpace.
Over the past two weeks, Twitter has attracted the sort of hyperbole the Valley reserves for its next internet darling – though such self-reinforcing adulation also led to dotcom mania.
As we near the end of the term, the Yosef Wosk Student Learning Commons would like to remind you of the additional academic support we provide students in writing and learning skills. (Via one-on-one appointments or drop-in .)
As....students enter the semester's 'writing crunch' and then final exams, please take a minute to remind them that there is additional writing and learning skills support available in the Student Learning Commons (room 3695-Podium Level 3-to the right of the Library). (Emphases mine.)
Some of the areas our friendly and knowledgeable Peer Educators and myself can assist students in are:- planning and flow of a paper,
- integrating quotes (sic) and paraphrasing,
- improving coherence and cohesion,
- controlling sentence structure and punctuation,
- exam strategies,
- overcoming exam anxiety,
- ....more.
.....we do not edit or proof papers. The YWSLC Coordinator and Peers provide the insight, skills, and techniques to improve a students own performance, including learning how to write, edit and proofread their own work.
Support for my contention that the First World War still has very powerful resonancy in Canada today comes from two recent news stories.EDMONTON — Doreen Bargholz's family rarely talked about her uncle, Private Herbert Peterson.Next, is a story from the Toronto Globe and Mail concerning ongoing argument over the legitimacy of the maple-leaf Canadian flag (accused of being a partisan Liberal-party product) versus the traditional Red Ensign (supported vigorously by Canadian veterans.)
His parents and five brothers were heartbroken when the 22-year-old soldier from rural Alberta never returned from the muddy French battlefields of the First World War. The military told them he had gone missing, and was presumed dead.
"There was a big photo of him hanging in my grandparents' living room. That's how I knew him," the 78-year-old Ms. Bargholz said in an interview.
But thanks to hard work by a team of Canadian scientists, genealogists and Defence Department historians and officials, the private's body was recovered in 2003 and identified earlier this year.
OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper has requested the Red Ensign flag fly at Vimy Ridge ceremonies next month, The Globe and Mail has learned.
Mr. Harper told his cabinet ministers yesterday that he wanted both the Red Ensign and the Maple Leaf hoisted in Vimy, France, at the 90th anniversary of the First World War battle, sources close to the Prime Minister said. "He said, 'The Red Ensign of 1917 will fly over Vimy,' " one source told The Globe.
The decision was hailed as a victory by veterans' groups and advocates, who have been lobbying Ottawa to have the historical ensign displayed over the Canadian National Vimy Memorial.
That is, our focused study of Parade's End is coming to and an end. For me, Madox Ford's master-work is the centre of our course: a major literary work which gives gravity to a select cluster of consequential satellite novels and first-class poetry. Not only a tetralogy but a foundational text in the development of literary modernism, Parade's End is daunting enough in its mere form. Moreover, its setting in the span, across the Great War, from the Edwardian to the Georgian eras; and its representation of a social ideal - English Toryism -- as dead entirely to us as the Myan priesthood, adds blank unfamiliarity to the challenges that the book seemingly presents to today's reader.
Suicide bombers strike with chlorine in Iraq
SAMEER N. YACOUB Associated Press
BAGHDAD — Multiple suicide bombings struck the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Anbar province, and about 350 Iraqi civilians and six U.S. troops were treated for exposure to chlorine gas, the military said Saturday. At least two policemen also were killed in the attacks.
Canada Day this year is the 91st Anniversary of the the Somme. The Canadian Press news wire leads with this story:On the Somme, some 73,000 British dead were never identified; at Verdun, the "unknown" are buried in regiments.
Paul Stanway.
OTTAWA (CP) - Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Governor General Michaelle Jean began Canada Day celebrations Saturday by taking part in a wreath-laying ceremony at the National War Memorial. The event marked the 90th anniversary of the Battles of the Somme and Beaumont-Hamel. It was "very, very moving," Harper later said in an interview with The Canadian Press.From the centre-left CBC to the centre right Edmonton Sun, an ideological range of Canadian media support my idea that WWI is loathed irrespective of a person's view toward war in general.
On Canada Day in 1916, some 100,000 soldiers of the British Empire climbed out of their trenches near the River Somme in northern France and advanced at walking pace towards the German line - only to meet death on a mind-boggling, industrial scale, in a futile contest that would redefine the meaning of slaughter. By the end of the day the British forces had suffered 60,000 casualties, including 20,000 dead - Canadians among them. At Beaumont-Hamel, the 1st Newfoundland Regiment was cut to pieces by the German machine-guns, with more than 700 casualties in half an hour.An interesting video reflection of the battle itself can be found on the BBC as well as a useful study into the origins of WWI. There is also a meaningful article on Britain's Oldest WWI survivor as well as this remarkable contemporaneous letter. There are powerful memorials being held in the north of France by the British.
Were Haig and his generals really "donkeys"? The evidence suggests not. Haig lost 58 of his fellow generals, killed or dying of wounds while leading from the front during the four years of war. Three died in the Somme in the first few days. So the General Melchett image of Blackadder - of arrogant Generals safe back at headquarters - is unfounded. They were brave...
Just wanted to send you this link to a great show about the trenches I watched this afternoon....a great review of how the trenches were built and what a terrible placement (geographically - visually laid out in the show) that the Allies had at Ypres, and how it was pure British patriotism / stoicism / stubbornness that kept the Western line against all odds.
A great story reported in the weekend's Toronto Globe & Mail about the upcoming 90th anniversary of the battle of Vimy Ridge. The Victoria Cross, the highest reward for military bravery in the Commonwealth, will apparently be again made available to Canadians in April when Her Majesty hands the Victoria Cross to our Prime Minister.The revival of the VC is a testament to the persistence of veterans' groups – notably the Royal Canadian Legion – which for years lobbied the federal government to reinstate it as Canada's foremost decoration for military valour. The VC was shunned in 1972 [i.e. by the Pierre Trudeau Liberals] when the government created a new Canadian honours system that neglected that the country might be at war again. The new system included military honours for meritorious service and bravery but nothing specifically for rare instances of military valour.
A Kindler, Gentler Tory Party: Whatever happened to Britain's Conservatives?
O Tempora, O Mores! During the week I recently spent in London, almost all the political gossip was about whether or not the latest leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, had made recreational use of marijuana—and perhaps other drugs—while at Oxford. There were also photographs of him in his undergraduate days, garbed in the uniform of an upper-crust student dining club that could have been captioned "Brideshead Regurgitated." Thus, if only in a slightly frivolous way, the association of the Tories with the nobs and the toffs and the privileged was still preserved in tabloid form. But there was a time when no serious Conservative would have been caught dead with a joint—the very symbol of '60s fatuity. And the interesting thing was to notice not how incongruous the story was with the style of today's Tory leadership, but rather how perfectly it seemed to fit it.
Classfellow A.O. sends along this link to a scan of a women's fashion paper -The Designer - from December 1903, the Corelli period. It's great to read the journal online, and the fashions match extant photos of Miss Corelli.
One of Canada's three surviving WWI veterans,Victor (Lloyd) Clemett, has just died.Born Dec. 10, 1899, in Toronto, Clemett lived a rich, long life spanningArticle on-line here at cbc.ca. The Canadian government is hoping to give one of its rare State funerals at the death of one or all of these remaining WWI veterans. Mr. Clemett has requested a private memorial.
more than a century....In 1916, Clemett enlisted in the army at the age of 16, following in the footsteps of his three older brothers. All four returned home at the end of the war.
But it is hard to talk about ‘modernism’ (or history) as a homogeneous mass, as will emerge in this Introduction. In my approach to Ford, then, I also fragment modernism itself. I focus on aspects of the modernist aesthetic that are particularly relevant to him and to his work; in so doing, I also demonstrate the fact that there is more to modernism than meets the eye. The prevailing wisdom concerning modernism and fragmentation (the ‘pattern’) is challenged in what follows. Ford, an advocate and cultivator of key modernist techniques, both uses these techniques to represent the fragmented experience and perception of modern life (in a text like The Good Soldier) and counters them (in what I call his positive fictions, like The Half Moon’).
Steven Marcus calls the relation between psychoanalysis and narrative writing ‘an ancient and venerable one’,11 and Freud himself stated in Studies on Hysteria that ‘it still strikes myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories’.12 As Marcus then deduces, ‘On this reading, human life is, ideally, a connected and coherent story, with all the details in explanatory place, and with everything [. . .] accounted for, in its proper causal or other sequence. And inversely, illness amounts at least in part to suffering from an incoherent story or an inadequate narrative account of oneself’ (p. 61).
Haslam, Sara. Fragmenting Modernism : Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War . Manchester , GBR p21 . http://site.ebrary.com/lib/sfu/Doc?id=10071290&ppg=34 Copyright © 2002. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
I can picture any one of the girls from Vile Bodies ending as the lady in this song by The Divine Comedy. At any rate, I think it's fairly easy to discern that is being said. I hope you enjoy it; I think this song is absolutely gorgeous. Something else of interest is that The Divine Comedy have one album called Fin de Siecle and another called Regeneration....The hotlink above (& this post title) take you to an audio of the song, and the lyrics can be read here. I agree wholeheartedly that the song is both gorgeous and pertinent.
A reminder to bring your Penguin Book of First World War Poetry text to class on Monday .... we'll look at some selected poems through a question relating to an aspect of their literary and extra-literary uniqueness.Sarah"killyrtv9" (NH) - See all my reviewsI have always loved writing poetry, but have often found it hard to read the works of other writers. This book changed me; I have read and re-read the poems collected in this book countless times. It never ceases to move me. The poems offer insight into life, death, love, and the meaning of patriotism. These poems helped me come closer to understanding the experiences of soldiers. Though written many years before I was even born, the themes throughout the book can still be related to today.
See the Course Syllabus for the assignment criteria.
Camille Paglia intends her latest book as a pertinent warning against putting technology before art, or, put another way, against giving the transient form more importance than the permament substance.
The BBC's "Remembrance" webpage is here.On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 the guns of Europe fell silent. After four years of the most bitter and devastating fighting, The Great War was finally over. The Armistice was signed at 5am in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiegne, France on November 11, 1918. Six hours later, at 11am, the war ended ....
All locomotion should cease, so that, in perfect stillness, the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the glorious dead.
Some Do Not:The three people absent last Wednesday can each slot into one of the six-member groups, next class.
H.B.
M.G.
D.B.
T.B.
R.S.
B.B.
No More Parades:
A.W.
M.Z.
C.L.
H.S.
A.O.
J.L.
D.S.
A Man Could Stand Up:
R.S.
S.R.
C.R.
J.T.
C.B.
L.H.
The Last Post:
K.S.
L.W.
D.G.
H.L.
S ....
J.G.
Opening lecture detailed the far remove at which the State was held from the individual in Britain before the Great War. You can find the same thesis argued in this history. One of the radical consequences of the First World War, and of the Modernist movement, was, as stated, the involvement of the State in individual lives to an increasing extent.Despite being richer, people are not happier than in earlier times. Only government can solve the problem, with a more caring attitude. And more therapists... more>>>>
Tempest's decision to choose heaven by becoming a better man and giving up his money is more noble and useful in a sense, because even while living in poverty, he will aid others and reform himself into a good man - both of which would take a great deal of perseverance and work. One can thus look at surrender to hell as a cowardly act. If Tempest had given himself to hell, it could have been considered a show of unwillingness to put the effort into becoming a man empathetic to others in pain, while leading a far more difficult life of poverty. In hell, Tempest would neither have been able to become a good man, nor help others. He also would not havelearned empathy, only regret and suffering.
First & foremost, I want you to know how grateful I am for your kind forebearance at this time. I promise it will not unappreciated.One way in which this project will be supported is the background material to the period & World War One provided by our Individual Presentations: we might consider making our Individual work generally available in e-text form.
A question was asked about fin de siecle and end-of-the-world mentality. The apocalyptic attitude is ages-old. Even in the New Testament warning is given:[1] This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. [2] For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, [3] Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, [4] Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; [5] Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away. [II Timothy 3.]
Reasons for the obsession with degeneracy among Victorians, ones that cut across class, sex and income, are manifold and over-determining. Ordinary fin de siecle consequences are of course important. Additionally, a technological explosion had originally driven the Industrial Revolution which at once created a working class and forced it into urban concentrations. The resulting slums throughout the proliferating major cities -- Manchester, Bradford, Leeds, Birmingham, Newcastle, &c. -- ignored hygiene and bred disease and ignored social welbeing and bred vice: gambling, prostitution, brawling and drunkenness. Victorian England was the high water mark of Methodism and Evangelicism and its crusade for social reformation was uniquely intense. Slavery and child labour were abolished; fourteen-hour factory work days were reduced for women; prisons and hospitals, through campaigners such as Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale, were made more humane. The Salvation Army campaigned to counter alcoholism and other vices. And the ever-intensifying technology of the Industrail revolution was turned, by reformers, to improve drainage, sewage and potable water systems.
To this social atmosphere I would add an element that I have not yet fully defined nor mapped the origins of (beyond its evolutionary connection to Puritanism), but which amounts to an aesthetic, emotional and an erotic preference for hid delights. It can be contrasted with an Age -- such as ours perhaps -- which prefers things revealed and decries restraint. The Victorians were titillated, and comforted, by what was known to exist but was draped from universal sight.
Add to this the intellectual earthquake which was Darwinism: a theory taken as a justification for progress and improvement -- the progress and improvement, that is, which is so much the character of Victorianism. The intellectual climate, then, produced a cast of mind which can be termed, not merely progressivist, but outright perfectibilian.
These, and indeed other, aspects of the Victorian Age, then, made it intensely (I don't say uniquely) expressive when developments which are comprehensibly termed "degeneracy" became evident. And thus it has become a commonplace among scholars of the Nineteenth Century to take obsession with degeneracy as a salient characteristic of the times.
One of the most intriguing questions about Baron Cohen’s characters is: why do so many people fall for the act? Partly he relies on good manners and politeness: “Ali G and Borat worked very well in England with the upper class because they were so polite. They would keep this person in their room. Members of the working class might have thrown him out; members of the middle class might not have revealed themselves as much.
“We found that the Deep South of America was very good for Borat because people were so polite and so welcoming of strangers. They were so proud of their American heritage that they would talk to this person about America and American values for an hour and a half.”
I've just finished The Sorrows of Satan and found a few resemblances to Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Both centre around a fairly naive young man who is corrupted by a worldy gentleman who intoxicates the naifs withthe possibilities their attributes will allow them to acheive - Dorian with his beauty and Geoffrey with his millions. (Also, both of the love interests were named Sibyl which stood out to me, although, perhapsthat was simply the "it" name for the end of the 19th century). However, one of the major differences, I found, was Corelli gives Geoffrey a second chance to mend his ways, Wilde leaves Dorian as a wretched corpse, completely unrecognizable to his servants. This redemption, of course, is important in the Christian faith and what I would imagine is Marie Corelli's world view. Also, this book has unearthed my Catholic guilt, which was quite unexpected.
If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line / as
a man of culture rare ... And ev'ryone will say / As you walk your flow'ry way, / "If he's content with a vegetable love which would certainly not suit me, / Why, what a most particularly pure young man / this pure young man must be!"
Interestingly, while many had criticism for Dawn Eden’s article “Casual sex is a con: women just aren’t like men” little was said on Sybil’s dialogue excerpt from Marie Corelli’s “The Sorrows of Satan”. Both written pieces express similar opinions on the issue of chastity and women. Thus I wondered if the way each opinion is presented, had anything to do with the discrepancy between the number of criticisms raised for Eden’s article and Corelli’s book. For me, it is less shocking to see an opinion I object to in the form of a dialogue, than in an article. In the case of Sybil’s speech, the presence of Geoffrey’s voice objecting to her opinions, made it somewhat disputable as to whether Corelli truly or fully shared Sybil’s beliefs. Moreover, because Sybil is a fictional character, the manner in which she delivers her ideas (“preachy”) could not be assumed as the way Corelli would have presented the same opinions. It would be
understandably more difficult to critic Corelli directly for her opinions and how she articulates them. Eden’s work however, simply by being an article, left no doubt about the fact that the opinions and the manner they are expressed are certainly hers.
A very helpful article in, of all places, the Toronto Globe & Mail, on the student's vice of procrastination:....15 to 20 per cent of us are procrastinators. The condition is even more prevalent among the student population, where a third of most students' days are eaten up by procrastinating, something he pointed out yesterday while students seated around him gabbed, surfed the Internet and slept in a lounge on campus.Click here for more >>
"Usually when I have an assignment I put it off until later," confessed Robert Maxwell, an 18-year-old biology student as he was distracted from his textbook on plants.
"It's a bad habit."
Three major factors contribute to precisely that habit, according to Prof. Steel. Self-confidence is key. Those who believe they can, essentially, will and those who don't, won't. The value of the task is important in whether it gets done. Is it something to enjoy or dread? And finally, delay. When does the task need to be completed? It's hard to get motivated about something that can be put off until some distant deadline looms.
Regarding Crime and Punishment, it "appeared" in 1866, before Sorrows of Satan in 1895. I think why Crime and Punishment reminds me so much of Sorrows of Satan, is the desperation of the main characters. Yet whereas Raskolnikov, provokes sympathy, Mr. Tempest provokes disdain. Both books seem to provoke thoughts about tour human nature and its split in character about what is right and what is wrong. It is certainly an interesting read after Milton's Paradise Lost!
P.S. Pp. 108, 111,137,138 are some points of interest where Mr. Tempest shows his division of character best so far
I trust that you all made it safely off the mountain last night: I confess that duty alone made me hold the class against better judgement. If it is any consolation, I was trapped here until after seven-thirty and when I got to the bottom of Gaglardi by the Big Bend I, quite literally, could have got out of my car, put on my CCM Tacks & around skated with ease. A bus smashed in the middle of the hill, jack-knifed into a truck, & about a hundred cars simply abandoned. A compleat disaster.
An excellent article here with practical advice from Jack Lynch at Rutgers University on success, lovely success; "A" glorious "A."
As argued in lecture, there was no cause to the First World War. The popular factoid that the death of a minor (though pleasant and competant) European royal in a dour Balkan capital caused the West to immolate itself in four years of a Dantean Inferno in French ditches is not false but merely silly on its face.Take a simple illustrative example. I am about to pot the black in a game of snooker. Thwack! It's in; I win yet again. Material cause is the solid constrution of the table, balls, &c.: if the cue ball were tissue and the black jello, the event (the potting of the black) would not take place. Formal cause is the rules of billiards, the shape of the table, cue, rack, and all the other contributing elements that shape and frame -- i.e. that form -- the event. Efficient cause, of course, is the mechanics behind the cue hitting the cue ball. And final cause is Stephen Ogden winning the match and having his universal supremacy at billiards re-affirmed for posterity . Or something like that.
Applying, then, the robust pre-Enlightenment concept of causation to the problem of how and why the First World War began we see at once its great explanatory power as well as the relative feebleness of the Englightenment's shrunken understanding of "cause". The killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by an inept Bosnian terrorist is efficient cause of the First World War: and a good efficient cause it is. But being stuck in Englightenment-Cause thinking has trapped the generations of post-War scholars in an impossible search for more, or for bigger, or for better efficient causes: impossible, because no efficient cause and no amount or quality of efficient causes can ever fully explain an event. Now, of course, if the event should happen to be small enough, and if the mind contemplating the case be sufficiently bereft of imagination (or, it might be said, of rigour), then an efficient cause can seem adequate. But events on a large or more significant scale reveal the impotence of the Enlightenment-Cause model.
Material cause of the War includes 1914 Europe's demographics, military technology & ordnance, national-geographical, and perhaps the crossover network of treaties in effect. Its formal cause can be summed up as the ethnic, cultural and political histories of the nations and Empires involved. And final cause is ..... well, final cause is for each historian, historiographer and theologian to decide and to argue individually.
Ford Madox Ford in Parade's End puts one conviction of WWI's final cause -- the Tories' -- into the mouth of the protagonist Christopher Tietjens; and that would be the altruism of England. Tietjens is Ford's literary manifestation of Tory England, so when it is said of him that "....it is, in fact, asking for trouble if you are more altruist than the society that surrounds you," [Penguin, 207] it is actually England that has asked for trouble (and will, in fact, be smashed -- insofar as its Tory character is concerned) by entering the War altruistically to defend the "surrounding" societies of the Belgians and the French primarily for the sake of (to Madox Ford, cricket-inspired) Duty.
[Tietjens'] mind was at rest because there was going to be a war. From the first moment of his reading the paragraph about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand he had known that, calmly and with assurance. Had he imagined that this country would come in he would not have known a mind at rest. He loved this country for the run of the hills, the shape of its elm trees and the way the heather, running uphill to the skyline, meets the blue of the heavens. War for this country could only mean humiliation, spreading under the sunlight, an almost invisible pall over the elms, the hills, the heather, like the vapour that spread from .... oh, Middlesbrough! .... But of war for us [i.e. Britain] he had no fear. He saw our Ministry sitting tight till the opportune moment, and then grabbing a French channel port or a few German colonies as the price of neutrality.
You each will, I trust, be able to advance your own final cause of the War with our course under your belt ....
And to conclude, there was indeed no "cause" for the First World War: but there were, as for everything, four causes.
Update: Click this link for a typical school history attempting to explain the First World War in terms limited to efficient causes. It is actually a fairly sophisticated attempt of its type, differentiating as it does between "long term" and "short term" [efficient] causes.
Click image for larger view.
The success of contemporary British novelist Pat Barker's 1990s Regeneration trilogy and its subsequent film adaptation has opened new interest in World War One and indicates that Britain may at last be ready to confront the full atrocity of that unnecessary, unfinished and unconscionably mismanaged war. So unbearable were life and death alike in trench warfare that works of imagination in Britain struggled to face its full horrors squarely. Indeed, the literary history of 20th Century Britain to 1945 - including works as diverse as Lady Chatterley's Lover and Lord of the Rings - is traceably scarred by festering wounds of the "War to End all Wars." In this course we will read and examine several now-neglected masterpieces by important British writers of the period, and see how each in its own artistic terms both succeeds and fails to respond adequately the (perhaps literally) unspeakable horrors of the trenches. We will look too at a few of the great First World War poets, including Sassoon and Owen, who, writing as they did from front-line experience, more immediately recorded those terrors, like gas warfare and shell shock, not even named before their devastation was accomplished.
NOTE: The BBC comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth, set in World War One, will be seen in clips throughout the course to give dramatic background and satiric analysis of the events. Testimony to the unresolved status of World War One in Britain, laughter turned to cathartic sorrow when first broadcast of the series' poignant conclusion produced national weeping.
REQUIRED TEXTS:
Corelli, Marie The Sorrows of Satan
Forester, C. S. The General
Ford, Maddox Ford Parade's End
Woolf, Virginia Jacob's Room
Waugh, Evelyn Vile Bodies
Silkin, John, ed. Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
The following texts will be placed on reserve in the library: Women's Fiction &; the Great War by Raitt & Tate; Regeneration by P. Barker; The Great War in British Literature by A. Barlow; and The War in the Trenches by A. Lloyd.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
10% Class participation
10% Class presentation
20% Mid-term paper (approx. 2000 words)
20% Group project
40% Final paper (approx. 3500 words)
