Sean A. McPhail | University of Windsor (original) (raw)

Journal Publications by Sean A. McPhail

First World War Studies, 2022

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2022

Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, 2021

The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston is a key text supporting Siegfried Sassoon’s reputation ... more The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston is a key text supporting Siegfried Sassoon’s reputation as Britain’s pre-eminent Great War-writer. Critics have nevertheless reached no consensus as to whether these lightly fictionalised “memoirs” represent true accounts of Sherston’s/ Sassoon’s war or fictional constructions. They have also yet to account for the differences between the Memoirs and Sassoon’s war-poetry, and between Sherston’s stated commemorative goals and his complete account. This article dissects the Memoirs’ adaptation of Sassoon’s front-line poetics of commemoration: it reads their new application of this poetics via his compositional difficulties, his dependence upon his own wartime writings, and life-writing’s uneasy relationship to truth. As I show, Sherston has more in common with his author than Sassoon intended, but differences remain; still, his memoirs have as much right to that appellation as any other text in the language.

Virginia Woolf and Social Justice: The 29th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Proceedings), 2022

The Modernist Review, 2019

European Comic Art, 2019

This article compares Gudrun Pausewang’s 1987 West German young adult novel Die Wolke to Anike Ha... more This article compares Gudrun Pausewang’s 1987 West German young adult
novel Die Wolke to Anike Hage’s 2013 manga adaptation. In so doing, it
charts the development of West/Germans’ relationship to the outside world
over the quarter-century separating the texts. I begin by considering the
perceived threat of German annihilation – whether nuclear or environmental
– in each era, as well as the change in German attitudes to democratic
institutions since reunification. I then analyse each Germany’s
relation to its respective role in the Second World War, before examining
how West/Germans in each text express either a German or a European
identity. The article finds evidence in Hage’s adaptation of a decided shift
in German thinking from a predominantly nationalist perspective towards
an informed, pan-European and increasingly international outlook.

English Today, 2017

Konglish is a blend of Korean and English found throughout South Korea, and often suffers for lac... more Konglish is a blend of Korean and English found throughout South Korea, and often suffers for lack of prestige amongst Koreans. The primary aim of this article is to determine the reasons behind Konglish's low social status in Korea. I begin my investigation by exploring Korean public space as linguistic space, and examining in what social and cultural capacities Koreans use English, Mandarin, Korean, and Konglish. I then shift in part II to discuss perceptions of Korean and English inside Korea. Having analysed Koreans’ attitudes towards Konglish's parent languages, I discuss in part III why Konglish struggles for social legitimacy, despite its ubiquity. In the course of this investigation it will become clear that Koreans often deride Konglish for its ease of use. Because one absorbs it organically through cultural exposure rather than hours of study and millions of won in tuition fees, Konglish accords none of the prestige that comes with Standard English; meanwhile, Konglish's mixed nature means not only that it cannot benefit from the national pride Koreans associate with ‘pure’ Korean, but also that this pride harms Konglish's reception throughout the country.

Studies in Canadian Literature, 2016

In her introduction to Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman, A.S. Byatt notes that “Munro is fl... more In her introduction to Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman, A.S. Byatt notes that “Munro is fluidly inventive in her use of time and tense, as she is in her point of view. She makes long, looping strings of events…recomposing events as memory does” (xv). In Byatt’s opinion, the volume’s second story, “Jakarta,” is “[o]ne of Munro’s great achievements,” because of its “steady, quotidian, inexorable movement of time,” and its “giddy shifts of point of view” (xv). Indeed, “Jakarta” presents several competing focalizations that examine only one major sequence of events — a series of summer get-togethers that a pair of couples share around 1959. The story moves twice between the internal focalization of Kath Mayberry, and that of her husband Kent as he recalls the same summer in the 1990s. The reader thus experiences “Jakarta” as two iterations of one narrative, focalized through two distinct perspectives that confront the narrative’s key moments either in the present, or by distant recollection. By considering each of “Jakarta’s” four sections, this article examines how Kent’s memories compare to Kath’s experience of their increasingly uncomfortable marriage. Moreover, because the focalizer employs language relative to each character, it asserts that the central crisis of the story is one of identity. While Kath struggles to reconcile her established self with her newfound roles of wife and mother, Kent is comfortable with who he is. In each case it is the inflected language of the focalizer that most betrays Kath and Kent’s disparate mental states.

Conference Presentations by Sean A. McPhail

Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English Annual Conference, 2021

This paper reads Siegfried Sassoon’s 1948 biography Meredith against the autobiographies he wrote... more This paper reads Siegfried Sassoon’s 1948 biography Meredith against the autobiographies he wrote during the Second World War. I contend that the process of drafting his own life-story taught Sassoon the impossibility of creating an objective-historical account, long assumed to be fundamental to the genre of life-writing. By close-reading Sassoon-as-narrator’s repeated breaks into Meredith’s seemingly conventional account, I demonstrate Sassoon’s hidden transformation of the literary (auto)biography. Whatever his antipathy towards his modernist contemporaries, Sassoon’s experience writing his own history nevertheless compelled him to overhaul an established genre to address the indeterminacies of self and objective-historical narrative central to modernist writing.

Modernist Studies Association, 2019

Co-written with Pat Rae and Austin Riede 1914-1945 — the period Siegfried Sassoon called “a ceme... more Co-written with Pat Rae and Austin Riede

1914-1945 — the period Siegfried Sassoon called “a cemetery for the civilized delusions of the nineteenth century” — saw millions of Britons fighting in two world wars and the Spanish Civil War, and marked a significant evolution in views about testimonial authority in wartime (Weald 274). Of prime importance is the changing status of frontline testimony exemplified by soldier-poets’ narratives of the Great War. In their commemorative writings, Sassoon and his peers argued for a radical shift away from the authority traditionally accompanying Government, Army, and journalistic accounts of war, and towards the direct experience of frontline combatants. While the protest-poet’s war-narrative and its discounting of home front experience held unique authority in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, recent scholarship has demonstrated that this authority was challenged in Britain’s succeeding wars. This panel proposes reading Britain’s evolving relationship to war and testimonial authority through three key writers who each survived multiple unique engagements with twentieth-century warfare.

Less well-known than his poetry and memoirs, Sassoon’s autobiographies were composed from the uncomfortable position of “armchair-combatant” during the Second World War. Forced into the helpless position of those he had long rallied against, Sassoon-as-civilian reluctantly reoriented his approach to narrative authority by retroactively incorporating non-combatants’ experiences of war and suffering into his own autobiographical testimony.

Another evolving perspective on narrative authority is that of Basil Bunting, who was imprisoned for refusing to be conscripted in 1918. His poem about this traumatic episode, “Villon,” is as physically personal as the protest-poets’ works. Bunting imbues his work with Eliotic references to the deep European past. Reflecting on Bunting’s position as conscientious objector, “Villon” interweaves that past in a way that combatant-poetry generally eschews. Despite his experience in WWI, however, Bunting later served as an intelligence officer in Persia during WWII. In “The Spoils”, and the autobiographic “Brigglflatts”, Bunting refers to his time on the active side of military duty through allusions to Europe and Britain’s martial and epic-poetic past.

Finally, George Orwell demonstrates an evolving position on frontline correctives to homefront propaganda in his writings on the Spanish Civil War. Homage to Catalonia emulates the soldier-poets’ “debunking” vision of war, suggesting an analogy between anti-fascist jingoism in 1937 Britain and homefront propaganda from 1914-1918. Orwell’s suspicion of atrocity propaganda leads him to modify his frontline testimony, effacing references to pain and suffering, and downplaying the dangers represented by bombing planes. In 1942, however, Orwell revisits this manipulation of testimonial authority with shame, recognizing that his (and others’) practice of lingering on the problematic effects of homefront propaganda had contributed to a culture of appeasement. Orwell’s mature perspective on atrocity propaganda illuminates key factors in the evolving relationship between frontline testimony and homefront culture between the wars.

Thus, each of these writers used his own experience of Britain’s later conflicts to reconsider the testimonial authority staked by the soldier-poets of 1914-18. They advocate against any monumental war-myth, calling for a reconstruction of testimonial writing that relies upon polyphonic sources, including, but not limited to, frontline combatants.

Modernist Studies Association, 2019

1914-1945 -- the period Siegfried Sassoon called “a cemetery for the civilized delusions of the n... more 1914-1945 -- the period Siegfried Sassoon called “a cemetery for the civilized delusions of the nineteenth century” -- saw millions of Britons fighting in two world wars and the Spanish Civil War, and marked a significant evolution in views about testimonial authority in wartime (Weald 274). Of prime importance is the changing status of frontline testimony exemplified by soldier-poets’ narratives of the Great War. In their commemorative writings, Sassoon and his peers argued for a radical shift away from the authority traditionally accompanying Government, Army, and journalistic accounts of war, and towards the direct experience of frontline combatants. While the protest-poet’s war-narrative and its discounting of homefront experience held a unique authority in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, recent scholarship has demonstrated that this authority was challenged in Britain’s succeeding wars. This panel proposes reading Britain’s evolving relationship to war and testimonial authority through three key writers who each survived multiple unique engagements with twentieth-century warfare.

Less well-known than his poetry and memoirs, Sassoon’s autobiographies were composed from the uncomfortable position of “armchair-combatant” during the Second World War. Forced into the helpless position of those he had long rallied against, Sassoon-as-civilian reluctantly reoriented his approach to narrative authority by retroactively incorporating non-combatants’ experiences of war and suffering into his own autobiographical testimony.

Another evolving perspective on narrative authority is that of Basil Bunting, who was imprisoned for refusing to be conscripted in 1918. His poem about this traumatic episode, “Villon,” is as physically personal as the protest-poets’ works. Bunting imbues his work with Eliotic references to the deep European past. Reflecting on Bunting’s position as conscientious objector, “Villon” interweaves that deep past in a way that combatant-poetry generally eschews. Despite his experience in WWI, however, Bunting later served as an intelligence officer in Persia during WWII. In “The Spoils”, and the autobiographic “Briggflatts”, Bunting refers to his time on the active side of military duty through allusions to Europe and Britain’s martial and epic-poetic past.

Finally, George Orwell demonstrates an evolving position on frontline correctives to homefront propaganda in his writings on the Spanish Civil War. Homage to Catalonia emulates the soldier-poets’ “debunking” vision of war, suggesting an analogy between anti-fascist jingoism in 1937 Britain and homefront propaganda from 1914-1918. Orwell’s suspicion of atrocity propaganda leads him to modify his frontline testimony, effacing references to pain and suffering, and downplaying the dangers represented by bombing planes. In 1942, however, Orwell revisits this manipulation of testimonial authority with shame, recognizing that his (and others’) practice of lingering on the problematic effects of homefront propaganda had contributed to a culture of appeasement. Orwell’s mature perspective on atrocity propaganda illuminates key factors in the evolving relationship between frontline testimony and homefront culture between the wars.

Thus, each of these writers used his own experience of Britain’s later conflicts to reconsider the testimonial authority staked by the soldier-poets of 1914-18. They advocate against any monumental war-myth, calling for a reconstruction of testimonial writing that relies upon polyphonic sources, including, but not limited to, frontline combatants.

Virginia Woolf and Social Justice, 2019

Simon Featherstone argues that Great War-writers like Siegfried Sassoon developed a “politics and... more Simon Featherstone argues that Great War-writers like Siegfried Sassoon developed a “politics and poetics of exclusive knowledge” founded upon war-experience (446). Excluded from front line participation—and thus from anthologies centred upon combat-experience—Virginia Woolf’s women characters nevertheless also perform the work of mourning necessitated by war. If the war is “over” for Clarissa Dalloway, it is not so for Mrs Foxcroft or Lady Bexborough, whose “nice boy[s]” were killed (4). Meanwhile, Septimus Smith’s suicide brings war back to Clarissa and his widow Lucrezia, and war-death informs the women focalizing Jacob Flanders in Jacob’s Room and Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. Whether to spouse, son, or near-stranger, Woolf’s women repeatedly turn their thoughts to the war’s dead, attempting to make sense of their losses.
Recent scholarship has incorporated women’s war-experiences through their commemorative-poetry (Featherstone 445), and Erin Penner has briefly posited Woolf’s transformation of the elegy by “rewrit[ing]” it “into prose” (25). Building upon these innovations, I examine Woolf’s depiction of women’s mourning in the aforementioned novels. Although Woolf felt it “impossible to overlook” Sassoon’s soldier’s perspective—one closed to her and her women characters—her women nevertheless commemorate loss as Sassoon does in his war-poetry: by repeatedly and involuntarily remembering their deceased objects as they attempt to go about their lives (qtd. in Das 9). They maintain thereby an individual connection with the dead that traditional elegiac consolation would foreclose. Soldier-poets thus “founded” an elegiac canon of perpetually-delayed consolation, constituting a new form of commemorative writing. Via their subversion of traditional elegiac form, I contend, Woolf’s novels perform a similar operation via prose fiction, expanding thereby the category of individual war-mourner to include women on the Homefront.

Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, 2018

Recounting his experiences fighting in France during the Great War, Siegfried Sassoon recalls see... more Recounting his experiences fighting in France during the Great War, Siegfried Sassoon recalls seeking respite from the physical torment of trench life within the covers of a book:
I was huddled up in a little dogkennel of a dug-out, reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles and trying to forget about the [War]…I was meditating about England…dark dogs barking, cocks crowing, and all the casual tappings and twinklings of the countryside...It was for all that, I supposed, that I was in the front-line with soaked feet, trench mouth, and feeling short of sleep. (Infantry Officer 325-26)
This explicit juxtaposition of his claustrophobic suffering with the Arcadian glory of "Thomas Hardy's England" is a common one in Sassoon's memoirs (323). The pastoral nature of his escape fantasy is no accident, but rather the opposite of the dismal subterranean world within which he suddenly found himself, with no pretensions to comfort save the "literary furniture" he kept in his pocket (Winter 248). My paper will begin with a discussion of how Sassoon repeatedly sought to flee via his reading material what Sandra Gilbert calls the "antipastoral deathscape" of trench life (185). I will argue, in turn, that this escapist fantasy dominates the lyric poetry Sassoon composed in situ in France. As fellow-soldier-poet Ivor Gurney explains, Sassoon's lyric poems "are charms to magic him out of the present. Cold feet, lice, a sense of fear…Beauty is the only comfort" (qtd. in Howarth 55). The corporeal wants Sassoon experienced in the trenches thus directly inform his frontline lyric poetry.
To leave my investigation here, however, is to tell but half the story. As Patrick Campbell asserts, while one may "repress its horrors, [and] escape to an Edenic world," the natural "response to the Armageddon of the trenches is to savage those unwilling to face up to its realities" (83). The second half of my presentation will therefore shift, and consider the poetry that Sassoon composed following his removal from combat. As I will demonstrate, the brutality of trench warfare asserts itself in the poetry composed at home. It is aimed at those who did not directly experience the reality of warfare, and inverts bucolic imagery to satirise England's "arm-chair" warriors—men past service age (especially soldiers' fathers), journalists, clergymen, and women. One poem I will consider, "Glory of Women," is specifically addressed to its intended targets. There, Sassoon scorns English mothers "thrilled" by "tales of dirt and danger" who
can't believe that British troops 'retire'
When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood. (72)
The poem closes with an apostrophe to a mother knitting socks for her son as his "face is trodden deeper in the mud" (72). Where dirt once lent a soldier valour, it now desecrates the corpse of her fallen son. As I will demonstrate, Sassoon's poetry became uncomfortable to confront those who had never left the comforts of home; it became, simultaneously, a "source[] of disgust and of (disgusting) pleasure” (Rowlinson 118).

Diasporic Joyce: Toronto 2017, 2017

My paper considers the Catholic Church’s use of awe, sacrament, and language within James Joyce’s... more My paper considers the Catholic Church’s use of awe, sacrament, and language within James Joyce’s depictions of Irish life. As I demonstrate, in Joyce’s fiction the Church’s primary concern is to command Irish attention. Whether like Stephen’s aunt Dante in Portrait one submit meekly to the Church’s temporal power, or like Stephen throughout Ulysses proudly declare “non serviam,” in each case the Irish worldview necessarily operates around—and in conjunction with—the Church’s colonial presence in Joyce’s Ireland (541).
Others have noticed the top-down power-structure the Church imposes on Irish life. Kevin Farrell, for example, posits that sacraments are central to the Church’s control of Stephen’s world as they “initi[ate] the individual progressively into the community of the Catholic faithful” (28). When Stephen eventually turns away from the Church, it continues to dominate his mental and spiritual life. As Stephen’s friend Cranly observes in Portrait: “It is a curious thing, do you know…how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve” (202). Even in leaving Ireland Stephen cannot escape the grasp of Catholicism because it is quite literally a part of who he is. Garry Leonard asserts that Stephen’s soul “has been colonized, by the Catholic Church, using fear-based tactics” (10-11). As Joyce himself argued in his Trieste lectures, “I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul” (qtd. in Leonard 11). Any attempt to qualify Joyce’s colonial Ireland must therefore consider the role of the Catholic Church in that colonisation.
My paper will ask the following questions: Why do Joyce’s characters continuously comment on the power of the Roman Church to command the attention of the Irish mind? How is the Church able to capitalise on the market of attention that it seeks to create? What is the cost to those whose frames of reference it increasingly monopolises? What role does the Church play with regards to nascent Irish nationalisms of the early twentieth century?

Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, 2017

Canadian Association of University Teachers of German, 2016

Canadian Association of University Teachers of German, 2015

Papers by Sean A. McPhail

n her introduction to Alice Munro's 1998 volume The Love of a Good Woman, A.S. Byatt notes that "... more n her introduction to Alice Munro's 1998 volume The Love of a Good Woman, A.S. Byatt notes that "Munro is fluidly inventive in her use of time and tense, as she is in her point of view. She makes long, looping strings of events between birth and death, recomposing events as memory does, but also with shocking artifice" (xv). Indeed, the collection's opening and title story presents the reader with these confusions of time and tense so thoroughly that, since its first publication, Robert Thacker has described it as "a central Munro text," and Dennis Duffy has lauded it as a "pivotal work in the structure of her fiction" (qtd. in Ross 786). In confining itself to the title story, however, this criticism has missed the equally multifaceted enigma that is the volume's next story, "Jakarta." As Catherine Sheldrick Ross argues, The Love of a Good Woman "offers. .. readers eight stories that seize us by the throat," and together they represent Munro's return "to earlier material. .. [but] in a form that is more complex and multilayered" (786). "Jakarta" is no exception. In Byatt's opinion, the story is "[o]ne of Munro's great achievements" because of its "steady, quotidian, inexorable movement of time" and its "giddy shifts of point of view" (xv). Similarly, though Ross's next assertion again concerns the title story, it is as crucial to

European Comic Art

This article compares Gudrun Pausewang’s 1987 West German young adult novel Die Wolke to Anike Ha... more This article compares Gudrun Pausewang’s 1987 West German young adult novel Die Wolke to Anike Hage’s 2013 manga adaptation. In so doing, it charts the development of West/Germans’ relationship to the outside world over the quarter-century separating the texts. I begin by considering the perceived threat of German annihilation – whether nuclear or environmental – in each era, as well as the change in German attitudes to democratic institutions since reunification. I then analyse each Germany’s relation to its respective role in the Second World War, before examining how West/Germans in each text express either a German or a European identity. The article finds evidence in Hage’s adaptation of a decided shift in German thinking from a predominantly nationalist perspective towards an informed, pan-European and increasingly international outlook.

First World War Studies, 2022

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2022

Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, 2021

The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston is a key text supporting Siegfried Sassoon’s reputation ... more The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston is a key text supporting Siegfried Sassoon’s reputation as Britain’s pre-eminent Great War-writer. Critics have nevertheless reached no consensus as to whether these lightly fictionalised “memoirs” represent true accounts of Sherston’s/ Sassoon’s war or fictional constructions. They have also yet to account for the differences between the Memoirs and Sassoon’s war-poetry, and between Sherston’s stated commemorative goals and his complete account. This article dissects the Memoirs’ adaptation of Sassoon’s front-line poetics of commemoration: it reads their new application of this poetics via his compositional difficulties, his dependence upon his own wartime writings, and life-writing’s uneasy relationship to truth. As I show, Sherston has more in common with his author than Sassoon intended, but differences remain; still, his memoirs have as much right to that appellation as any other text in the language.

Virginia Woolf and Social Justice: The 29th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Proceedings), 2022

The Modernist Review, 2019

European Comic Art, 2019

This article compares Gudrun Pausewang’s 1987 West German young adult novel Die Wolke to Anike Ha... more This article compares Gudrun Pausewang’s 1987 West German young adult
novel Die Wolke to Anike Hage’s 2013 manga adaptation. In so doing, it
charts the development of West/Germans’ relationship to the outside world
over the quarter-century separating the texts. I begin by considering the
perceived threat of German annihilation – whether nuclear or environmental
– in each era, as well as the change in German attitudes to democratic
institutions since reunification. I then analyse each Germany’s
relation to its respective role in the Second World War, before examining
how West/Germans in each text express either a German or a European
identity. The article finds evidence in Hage’s adaptation of a decided shift
in German thinking from a predominantly nationalist perspective towards
an informed, pan-European and increasingly international outlook.

English Today, 2017

Konglish is a blend of Korean and English found throughout South Korea, and often suffers for lac... more Konglish is a blend of Korean and English found throughout South Korea, and often suffers for lack of prestige amongst Koreans. The primary aim of this article is to determine the reasons behind Konglish's low social status in Korea. I begin my investigation by exploring Korean public space as linguistic space, and examining in what social and cultural capacities Koreans use English, Mandarin, Korean, and Konglish. I then shift in part II to discuss perceptions of Korean and English inside Korea. Having analysed Koreans’ attitudes towards Konglish's parent languages, I discuss in part III why Konglish struggles for social legitimacy, despite its ubiquity. In the course of this investigation it will become clear that Koreans often deride Konglish for its ease of use. Because one absorbs it organically through cultural exposure rather than hours of study and millions of won in tuition fees, Konglish accords none of the prestige that comes with Standard English; meanwhile, Konglish's mixed nature means not only that it cannot benefit from the national pride Koreans associate with ‘pure’ Korean, but also that this pride harms Konglish's reception throughout the country.

Studies in Canadian Literature, 2016

In her introduction to Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman, A.S. Byatt notes that “Munro is fl... more In her introduction to Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman, A.S. Byatt notes that “Munro is fluidly inventive in her use of time and tense, as she is in her point of view. She makes long, looping strings of events…recomposing events as memory does” (xv). In Byatt’s opinion, the volume’s second story, “Jakarta,” is “[o]ne of Munro’s great achievements,” because of its “steady, quotidian, inexorable movement of time,” and its “giddy shifts of point of view” (xv). Indeed, “Jakarta” presents several competing focalizations that examine only one major sequence of events — a series of summer get-togethers that a pair of couples share around 1959. The story moves twice between the internal focalization of Kath Mayberry, and that of her husband Kent as he recalls the same summer in the 1990s. The reader thus experiences “Jakarta” as two iterations of one narrative, focalized through two distinct perspectives that confront the narrative’s key moments either in the present, or by distant recollection. By considering each of “Jakarta’s” four sections, this article examines how Kent’s memories compare to Kath’s experience of their increasingly uncomfortable marriage. Moreover, because the focalizer employs language relative to each character, it asserts that the central crisis of the story is one of identity. While Kath struggles to reconcile her established self with her newfound roles of wife and mother, Kent is comfortable with who he is. In each case it is the inflected language of the focalizer that most betrays Kath and Kent’s disparate mental states.

Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English Annual Conference, 2021

This paper reads Siegfried Sassoon’s 1948 biography Meredith against the autobiographies he wrote... more This paper reads Siegfried Sassoon’s 1948 biography Meredith against the autobiographies he wrote during the Second World War. I contend that the process of drafting his own life-story taught Sassoon the impossibility of creating an objective-historical account, long assumed to be fundamental to the genre of life-writing. By close-reading Sassoon-as-narrator’s repeated breaks into Meredith’s seemingly conventional account, I demonstrate Sassoon’s hidden transformation of the literary (auto)biography. Whatever his antipathy towards his modernist contemporaries, Sassoon’s experience writing his own history nevertheless compelled him to overhaul an established genre to address the indeterminacies of self and objective-historical narrative central to modernist writing.

Modernist Studies Association, 2019

Co-written with Pat Rae and Austin Riede 1914-1945 — the period Siegfried Sassoon called “a ceme... more Co-written with Pat Rae and Austin Riede

1914-1945 — the period Siegfried Sassoon called “a cemetery for the civilized delusions of the nineteenth century” — saw millions of Britons fighting in two world wars and the Spanish Civil War, and marked a significant evolution in views about testimonial authority in wartime (Weald 274). Of prime importance is the changing status of frontline testimony exemplified by soldier-poets’ narratives of the Great War. In their commemorative writings, Sassoon and his peers argued for a radical shift away from the authority traditionally accompanying Government, Army, and journalistic accounts of war, and towards the direct experience of frontline combatants. While the protest-poet’s war-narrative and its discounting of home front experience held unique authority in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, recent scholarship has demonstrated that this authority was challenged in Britain’s succeeding wars. This panel proposes reading Britain’s evolving relationship to war and testimonial authority through three key writers who each survived multiple unique engagements with twentieth-century warfare.

Less well-known than his poetry and memoirs, Sassoon’s autobiographies were composed from the uncomfortable position of “armchair-combatant” during the Second World War. Forced into the helpless position of those he had long rallied against, Sassoon-as-civilian reluctantly reoriented his approach to narrative authority by retroactively incorporating non-combatants’ experiences of war and suffering into his own autobiographical testimony.

Another evolving perspective on narrative authority is that of Basil Bunting, who was imprisoned for refusing to be conscripted in 1918. His poem about this traumatic episode, “Villon,” is as physically personal as the protest-poets’ works. Bunting imbues his work with Eliotic references to the deep European past. Reflecting on Bunting’s position as conscientious objector, “Villon” interweaves that past in a way that combatant-poetry generally eschews. Despite his experience in WWI, however, Bunting later served as an intelligence officer in Persia during WWII. In “The Spoils”, and the autobiographic “Brigglflatts”, Bunting refers to his time on the active side of military duty through allusions to Europe and Britain’s martial and epic-poetic past.

Finally, George Orwell demonstrates an evolving position on frontline correctives to homefront propaganda in his writings on the Spanish Civil War. Homage to Catalonia emulates the soldier-poets’ “debunking” vision of war, suggesting an analogy between anti-fascist jingoism in 1937 Britain and homefront propaganda from 1914-1918. Orwell’s suspicion of atrocity propaganda leads him to modify his frontline testimony, effacing references to pain and suffering, and downplaying the dangers represented by bombing planes. In 1942, however, Orwell revisits this manipulation of testimonial authority with shame, recognizing that his (and others’) practice of lingering on the problematic effects of homefront propaganda had contributed to a culture of appeasement. Orwell’s mature perspective on atrocity propaganda illuminates key factors in the evolving relationship between frontline testimony and homefront culture between the wars.

Thus, each of these writers used his own experience of Britain’s later conflicts to reconsider the testimonial authority staked by the soldier-poets of 1914-18. They advocate against any monumental war-myth, calling for a reconstruction of testimonial writing that relies upon polyphonic sources, including, but not limited to, frontline combatants.

Modernist Studies Association, 2019

1914-1945 -- the period Siegfried Sassoon called “a cemetery for the civilized delusions of the n... more 1914-1945 -- the period Siegfried Sassoon called “a cemetery for the civilized delusions of the nineteenth century” -- saw millions of Britons fighting in two world wars and the Spanish Civil War, and marked a significant evolution in views about testimonial authority in wartime (Weald 274). Of prime importance is the changing status of frontline testimony exemplified by soldier-poets’ narratives of the Great War. In their commemorative writings, Sassoon and his peers argued for a radical shift away from the authority traditionally accompanying Government, Army, and journalistic accounts of war, and towards the direct experience of frontline combatants. While the protest-poet’s war-narrative and its discounting of homefront experience held a unique authority in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, recent scholarship has demonstrated that this authority was challenged in Britain’s succeeding wars. This panel proposes reading Britain’s evolving relationship to war and testimonial authority through three key writers who each survived multiple unique engagements with twentieth-century warfare.

Less well-known than his poetry and memoirs, Sassoon’s autobiographies were composed from the uncomfortable position of “armchair-combatant” during the Second World War. Forced into the helpless position of those he had long rallied against, Sassoon-as-civilian reluctantly reoriented his approach to narrative authority by retroactively incorporating non-combatants’ experiences of war and suffering into his own autobiographical testimony.

Another evolving perspective on narrative authority is that of Basil Bunting, who was imprisoned for refusing to be conscripted in 1918. His poem about this traumatic episode, “Villon,” is as physically personal as the protest-poets’ works. Bunting imbues his work with Eliotic references to the deep European past. Reflecting on Bunting’s position as conscientious objector, “Villon” interweaves that deep past in a way that combatant-poetry generally eschews. Despite his experience in WWI, however, Bunting later served as an intelligence officer in Persia during WWII. In “The Spoils”, and the autobiographic “Briggflatts”, Bunting refers to his time on the active side of military duty through allusions to Europe and Britain’s martial and epic-poetic past.

Finally, George Orwell demonstrates an evolving position on frontline correctives to homefront propaganda in his writings on the Spanish Civil War. Homage to Catalonia emulates the soldier-poets’ “debunking” vision of war, suggesting an analogy between anti-fascist jingoism in 1937 Britain and homefront propaganda from 1914-1918. Orwell’s suspicion of atrocity propaganda leads him to modify his frontline testimony, effacing references to pain and suffering, and downplaying the dangers represented by bombing planes. In 1942, however, Orwell revisits this manipulation of testimonial authority with shame, recognizing that his (and others’) practice of lingering on the problematic effects of homefront propaganda had contributed to a culture of appeasement. Orwell’s mature perspective on atrocity propaganda illuminates key factors in the evolving relationship between frontline testimony and homefront culture between the wars.

Thus, each of these writers used his own experience of Britain’s later conflicts to reconsider the testimonial authority staked by the soldier-poets of 1914-18. They advocate against any monumental war-myth, calling for a reconstruction of testimonial writing that relies upon polyphonic sources, including, but not limited to, frontline combatants.

Virginia Woolf and Social Justice, 2019

Simon Featherstone argues that Great War-writers like Siegfried Sassoon developed a “politics and... more Simon Featherstone argues that Great War-writers like Siegfried Sassoon developed a “politics and poetics of exclusive knowledge” founded upon war-experience (446). Excluded from front line participation—and thus from anthologies centred upon combat-experience—Virginia Woolf’s women characters nevertheless also perform the work of mourning necessitated by war. If the war is “over” for Clarissa Dalloway, it is not so for Mrs Foxcroft or Lady Bexborough, whose “nice boy[s]” were killed (4). Meanwhile, Septimus Smith’s suicide brings war back to Clarissa and his widow Lucrezia, and war-death informs the women focalizing Jacob Flanders in Jacob’s Room and Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. Whether to spouse, son, or near-stranger, Woolf’s women repeatedly turn their thoughts to the war’s dead, attempting to make sense of their losses.
Recent scholarship has incorporated women’s war-experiences through their commemorative-poetry (Featherstone 445), and Erin Penner has briefly posited Woolf’s transformation of the elegy by “rewrit[ing]” it “into prose” (25). Building upon these innovations, I examine Woolf’s depiction of women’s mourning in the aforementioned novels. Although Woolf felt it “impossible to overlook” Sassoon’s soldier’s perspective—one closed to her and her women characters—her women nevertheless commemorate loss as Sassoon does in his war-poetry: by repeatedly and involuntarily remembering their deceased objects as they attempt to go about their lives (qtd. in Das 9). They maintain thereby an individual connection with the dead that traditional elegiac consolation would foreclose. Soldier-poets thus “founded” an elegiac canon of perpetually-delayed consolation, constituting a new form of commemorative writing. Via their subversion of traditional elegiac form, I contend, Woolf’s novels perform a similar operation via prose fiction, expanding thereby the category of individual war-mourner to include women on the Homefront.

Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, 2018

Recounting his experiences fighting in France during the Great War, Siegfried Sassoon recalls see... more Recounting his experiences fighting in France during the Great War, Siegfried Sassoon recalls seeking respite from the physical torment of trench life within the covers of a book:
I was huddled up in a little dogkennel of a dug-out, reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles and trying to forget about the [War]…I was meditating about England…dark dogs barking, cocks crowing, and all the casual tappings and twinklings of the countryside...It was for all that, I supposed, that I was in the front-line with soaked feet, trench mouth, and feeling short of sleep. (Infantry Officer 325-26)
This explicit juxtaposition of his claustrophobic suffering with the Arcadian glory of "Thomas Hardy's England" is a common one in Sassoon's memoirs (323). The pastoral nature of his escape fantasy is no accident, but rather the opposite of the dismal subterranean world within which he suddenly found himself, with no pretensions to comfort save the "literary furniture" he kept in his pocket (Winter 248). My paper will begin with a discussion of how Sassoon repeatedly sought to flee via his reading material what Sandra Gilbert calls the "antipastoral deathscape" of trench life (185). I will argue, in turn, that this escapist fantasy dominates the lyric poetry Sassoon composed in situ in France. As fellow-soldier-poet Ivor Gurney explains, Sassoon's lyric poems "are charms to magic him out of the present. Cold feet, lice, a sense of fear…Beauty is the only comfort" (qtd. in Howarth 55). The corporeal wants Sassoon experienced in the trenches thus directly inform his frontline lyric poetry.
To leave my investigation here, however, is to tell but half the story. As Patrick Campbell asserts, while one may "repress its horrors, [and] escape to an Edenic world," the natural "response to the Armageddon of the trenches is to savage those unwilling to face up to its realities" (83). The second half of my presentation will therefore shift, and consider the poetry that Sassoon composed following his removal from combat. As I will demonstrate, the brutality of trench warfare asserts itself in the poetry composed at home. It is aimed at those who did not directly experience the reality of warfare, and inverts bucolic imagery to satirise England's "arm-chair" warriors—men past service age (especially soldiers' fathers), journalists, clergymen, and women. One poem I will consider, "Glory of Women," is specifically addressed to its intended targets. There, Sassoon scorns English mothers "thrilled" by "tales of dirt and danger" who
can't believe that British troops 'retire'
When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood. (72)
The poem closes with an apostrophe to a mother knitting socks for her son as his "face is trodden deeper in the mud" (72). Where dirt once lent a soldier valour, it now desecrates the corpse of her fallen son. As I will demonstrate, Sassoon's poetry became uncomfortable to confront those who had never left the comforts of home; it became, simultaneously, a "source[] of disgust and of (disgusting) pleasure” (Rowlinson 118).

Diasporic Joyce: Toronto 2017, 2017

My paper considers the Catholic Church’s use of awe, sacrament, and language within James Joyce’s... more My paper considers the Catholic Church’s use of awe, sacrament, and language within James Joyce’s depictions of Irish life. As I demonstrate, in Joyce’s fiction the Church’s primary concern is to command Irish attention. Whether like Stephen’s aunt Dante in Portrait one submit meekly to the Church’s temporal power, or like Stephen throughout Ulysses proudly declare “non serviam,” in each case the Irish worldview necessarily operates around—and in conjunction with—the Church’s colonial presence in Joyce’s Ireland (541).
Others have noticed the top-down power-structure the Church imposes on Irish life. Kevin Farrell, for example, posits that sacraments are central to the Church’s control of Stephen’s world as they “initi[ate] the individual progressively into the community of the Catholic faithful” (28). When Stephen eventually turns away from the Church, it continues to dominate his mental and spiritual life. As Stephen’s friend Cranly observes in Portrait: “It is a curious thing, do you know…how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve” (202). Even in leaving Ireland Stephen cannot escape the grasp of Catholicism because it is quite literally a part of who he is. Garry Leonard asserts that Stephen’s soul “has been colonized, by the Catholic Church, using fear-based tactics” (10-11). As Joyce himself argued in his Trieste lectures, “I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul” (qtd. in Leonard 11). Any attempt to qualify Joyce’s colonial Ireland must therefore consider the role of the Catholic Church in that colonisation.
My paper will ask the following questions: Why do Joyce’s characters continuously comment on the power of the Roman Church to command the attention of the Irish mind? How is the Church able to capitalise on the market of attention that it seeks to create? What is the cost to those whose frames of reference it increasingly monopolises? What role does the Church play with regards to nascent Irish nationalisms of the early twentieth century?

Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, 2017

Canadian Association of University Teachers of German, 2016

Canadian Association of University Teachers of German, 2015

n her introduction to Alice Munro's 1998 volume The Love of a Good Woman, A.S. Byatt notes that "... more n her introduction to Alice Munro's 1998 volume The Love of a Good Woman, A.S. Byatt notes that "Munro is fluidly inventive in her use of time and tense, as she is in her point of view. She makes long, looping strings of events between birth and death, recomposing events as memory does, but also with shocking artifice" (xv). Indeed, the collection's opening and title story presents the reader with these confusions of time and tense so thoroughly that, since its first publication, Robert Thacker has described it as "a central Munro text," and Dennis Duffy has lauded it as a "pivotal work in the structure of her fiction" (qtd. in Ross 786). In confining itself to the title story, however, this criticism has missed the equally multifaceted enigma that is the volume's next story, "Jakarta." As Catherine Sheldrick Ross argues, The Love of a Good Woman "offers. .. readers eight stories that seize us by the throat," and together they represent Munro's return "to earlier material. .. [but] in a form that is more complex and multilayered" (786). "Jakarta" is no exception. In Byatt's opinion, the story is "[o]ne of Munro's great achievements" because of its "steady, quotidian, inexorable movement of time" and its "giddy shifts of point of view" (xv). Similarly, though Ross's next assertion again concerns the title story, it is as crucial to

European Comic Art

This article compares Gudrun Pausewang’s 1987 West German young adult novel Die Wolke to Anike Ha... more This article compares Gudrun Pausewang’s 1987 West German young adult novel Die Wolke to Anike Hage’s 2013 manga adaptation. In so doing, it charts the development of West/Germans’ relationship to the outside world over the quarter-century separating the texts. I begin by considering the perceived threat of German annihilation – whether nuclear or environmental – in each era, as well as the change in German attitudes to democratic institutions since reunification. I then analyse each Germany’s relation to its respective role in the Second World War, before examining how West/Germans in each text express either a German or a European identity. The article finds evidence in Hage’s adaptation of a decided shift in German thinking from a predominantly nationalist perspective towards an informed, pan-European and increasingly international outlook.

Dissertation, 2021

Fraternity on the Front Lines examines the relationship between kinship and commemoration in the ... more Fraternity on the Front Lines examines the relationship between kinship and commemoration in the Great War diaries, poetry, and autobiographical prose that Siegfried Sassoon composed between 1915 and 1945. I contend that Sassoon's account of his front-line service first developed as a direct consequence of the fictive kinship bonds that united fighting men together in France, to the exclusion of the Homefront civilians from whom these soldiers felt themselves irreparably exiled. These men perceived their shared combat experience as forming the foundation of their interdependent relationships, and of the war narrative that they soon produced. That narrative's publication in their war-poetry and memoirs in turn supplied vivid details of the war that had remained otherwise inaccessible to most civilians even after 1918. Whatever its hostility to non-combatants, then, Britons began to adopt much of the combatantwriter's seemingly unimpeachable account nearly verbatim: soldiers' writings retroactively redefined the nation's larger relationship to the war so that the collective British war narrative after 1930 came to over-emphasise the figure of the soldier-poet, around whom it began to build a canon of war-books. While recent scholarship has worked to rediscover writings by the very groups that soldier-kin sought to exclude-women, conscientious objectors, colonial subjects, If it presents itself as the neat culmination of one's development as a student and researcher, a dissertation like this is in fact the end product of decades of nurturing and support. The first people that I need to thank, then, are those most special loved ones without whom I could not have undertaken this research. First amongst these worthies is my closest consultant, confidante, and emotional mainstay, my wife Stefanie McPhail-this dissertation is dedicated to her. I also want to say thank you to the best parents anyone could have asked for, Dennis and Bonnie McPhail, who have been there from before day one to celebrate every achievement and commiserate over every setback. Thanks also to my adoptive parents David and Susan Munford, who welcomed me into their family and added to the well of love and support in which I had already found myself. We miss you more each and every day Sue. To my brothers and sisters, by birth or by marriage, thank you all. To my writing partner Francesca and her new assistant Greta, thanks for keeping me on task. My first scholarly debt is to my doctoral supervisor, Garry Leonard. Since we met in my first year, Garry's poking and prodding, his questions and his suggestions, have all challenged me to continually evolve my thinking on this project without ever feeling that I had ceded control over the direction in which it was heading. Garry has been an excellent support not only in the literal sculpting of the thesis but also in my wider development as researcher and pedagogue during my tenure at Toronto-he has offered the same calm and experienced advice in response to questions about external publications and teaching problems as he has lent to my research. I am also grateful to my other committee members, Paul Stevens and Greig Henderson. Not only has Paul's expertise in the literature of the Great War made him a perfect sounding board for my ideas on the conflict and the works composed in its wake, but his lived experience as a soldier serving in 1 st Battalion, The Royal Welch Fusiliers enabled him to provide those crucial insights not to be found in the written scholarship he knows so well. Greig, meanwhile, gave me a muchneeded first nudge in my search for the theoretical materials on life-writing upon which chapters 4 and 5 depend so heavily. His inexhaustible patience with my writing's stylistic shortcomings is matched by his careful attention to the smallest details in the many drafts I have submitted to his scrutiny across the years. I also want to thank my internal examiner, Richard Greene, and my v external examiner, Vincent Sherry, for their pointed questions and considered suggestions for the future of this project during my defence. I am also indebted to a number of teachers, advocates, and friends at the University of Toronto who have always made me feel welcome and valued during my nearly six years at this institution. These include Nick Mount and Daniela Janes, the instructors under whom I repeatedly worked as a teaching assistant. I want to thank Nick and Daniela not simply for imparting to me many helpful teaching practices that I continue to employ in my classrooms, but also for allowing me repeated opportunities to attempt them myself. Carol Percy has been an excellent moral and intellectual support from the time of my first M.A. application to the Department in 2014. To my own brothers-in-arms-Rohan Ghatage, Billy Johnson, and Kyle Kinaschuk-my own fight has ended; I'll see you all soon on the other side. To my other graduate friends and colleagues, too numerous to name individually here: you know who you are and just how grateful I am for all that you do. Finally, I want to thank the dedicated administrators whose commitment and proficiency keeps the Department of English running so smoothly: Tanuja Persaud, Marguerite Perry, and Sangeeta Panjwani. Each of you is a key lifeline to the Department's graduate students. Thanks are also owing to those steadfast colleagues not currently located at Toronto. First among these are Pat Rae and Tracy Ware. Without Pat's undergraduate course on war-writing I would likely never have discovered how fascinating Sassoon's full life-story truly was; I am confident that this project would have never come to fruition without the near-decade of guidance she has since provided. It is thanks in large part to Tracy that I first saw my own name in print, and his perspective as non-specialist on British war-writing has allowed him to ask the pointed questions that so often elude those of us with our noses too close to the books in question. John Wells' excellent advice in the months preceding my visit to Cambridge University Library allowed me to make the absolute most of the five days I spent in the Sassoon Archives. Thanks also to my Woolfian friends-Drew Shannon, M. Rita D. Viana, and Jean