"Taming the Past, Shaping the Future: The Appropriation of the Great War Experience in the Popular Fiction of the Early Turkish Republic" (original) (raw)
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The Great War altered the traditional notion of war literature where war was assumed to be a cause for glory and pride. New technologies were unleashed, and for the first time a major war was fought not only on land and sea but below the sea and in the skies as well. Not only was the geographical landscape altered by the war but it also changed the lives of the soldiers. This thesis will look at two novels to detail how the representation of war in literature was transformed by World War I. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque is one of the most influential novels in World War I literature. Mulk Raj Anand's novel, Across the Black Waters is a rare World War I novel written from an Indian perspective. Both are postwar novels. Remarque's novel was first published in 1929, while Anand's novel came out in 1939. The titles of the novels reveal an ironic undertone ,emphasizing a connotative meaning, which outlays the undertones of the Great War. Both novels locate the horror of war but from different angles. Lives of the soldiers were dependent on the mode of survival by disconnecting their emotional capability. Both novels are realistic and draw a real picture of the catastrophe that the war creates in terms of violence, misery, plight, terror and repression. The purpose of this study is to show how the two novels differ in their representation of war literature and also, how this very representation is different from the novels that were written in pre-World War I era. So, the thesis will constitute an in-depth look into the battlefield. Historical material will be studied and analyzed along with the critical readings.
A Challenge to Global Literary History: The Case of World War I
Arcadia, 2018
This essay begins by investigating the possibility of a global literary history through the lens of periodization and its challenges for comparatists, starting from World War I. Second, by examining neglected texts from the periphery, it seeks to 'provincialize' the Eurocentric focus of our histories of war literature. To address the complex temporality of this epoch, we must accommodate the multicultural contexts from which these works emerge, as well as the long-term recovery of texts. Belatedness reflects the reemergence of memories from trauma, the discovery of manuscripts, the paucity of translations, and the long silencing of marginalized voices from the periphery. In turn, shifts in critical values and the translation of materials permit us to enlarge and reconstitute a globalized archive, as a few examples demonstrate. Great War texts by Huidobro, Svarnakumari, and Diallo as well as oral laments offer fruitful perspectives from the periphery on that epochal experience.
Studies in Twentieth-and Twenty-First Century Literature, 2017
By shedding light on some original responses to the Great War that are today hardly known, and by asking the same questions of many works written in contexts which were radically different, this STTCL special issue advocates for a genuinely comparative approach to this literature. Born in a context of nationalist withdrawal, these cultural objects also had a paradoxically wide circulation (due to early translations, commentaries, literary reactions, and so on), which is why study of these apparently isolated writers is so valuable.
The Untimely Sources of World War I: Taking Advantage of the Obsession with Commemorations
Archiv Orientalni 88 (3), 2020
Taking advantage of the activities prompted by the anniversaries of World War I, history writing engaged with the new directions that the humanities and social sciences were taking. One such direction was to connect with the often-overlooked stories of the voiceless at the margins in order to challenge the more dominant narratives of louder voices. Ego documents and self-testimonies bear the potential to drill holes if not tear down the narratives which feed hostile collective identities. Never has the time been so ripe to use these munitions: We currently live in a world that valorizes witness accounts. These accounts are different from those that have been selectively used for the creation of self-serving national collective memories. This tendency has increased lately due to growing temporal distance.
2021
This first monograph on WWI dramatic literature closes one of the last research desiderata of the German literature on the First World War. The author opens up a hitherto unknown corpus of texts and identifies the most important discourses represented in these WWI plays. Furthermore, he embeds the discourses in contemporary public debates and identifies them in more famous dramatic works of the Weimar Republic. This allows the analysis of the Heimkehrerdramen of Toller, Brecht, and Horváth to focus on the representation of contemporary narratives that have so far been overlooked and embeds these plays in the context in which they were created. Previously, this was only the case for Karl Kraus’s Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, which is also interpreted by the author in a newly established intertextual relationship with early WWI dramas. The approach this book takes not only provides new insights into WWI dramatic literature from 1914 to the end of the Weimar Republic, but also new points of departure for research in a number of literary and cultural studies fields.
From the National Context to its Margins: When the World Used Literature to Respond to the Great War
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
By shedding light on some original responses to the Great War that are today hardly known, and by asking the same questions of many works written in contexts which were radically different, this STTCL special issue advocates for a genuinely comparative approach to this literature. Born in a context of nationalist withdrawal, these cultural objects also had a paradoxically wide circulation (due to early translations, commentaries, literary reactions, and so on), which is why study of these apparently isolated writers is so valuable.