From the National Context to its Margins: When the World Used Literature to Respond to the Great War (original) (raw)
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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.
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.
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.
2016
Literature is shaped by many influences and war is one of them. Over the time war inspired many great literary works. However, no other event inspired this much literary works as World War I had. Literature began to change and evolve during and after World War I. Many authors of the time became disillusioned by the war and its aftermath, this destroyed their view and belief in traditional values. The amount of death and destruction they saw made them skeptic about everything. As a form of expressing this disillusionment and decay the writers broke new literary ground. The grief and despair caused by the war guided the writers towards modernist sentiment. This dissertation is an attempt to show the devastating impact of World War I, its literary representation and writers' response to this profound human experience. This paper has attempted to examine some of these writers' famous war literature to focus on the views they have expressed regarding war; their experiences during the war time and how those experiences forced them to speak up about these issues despite of strict political situation at that time. This paper has analyzed the work of four writers who wrote during the time of World War I. This research has focused on traditional war literature like the novels of Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway and poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon to show how these writers wrote not only to record what they had seen and experienced but also to create a resistance against the glorification of war. The first chapter of this dissertation will look into how Remarque's experience of this cataclysmic event urged him to write such novel that is well known as an anti-war novel and how aptly this novel has depicted the realities of the war. In order to gain different perspectives of writers on war and the impact of war the second chapter will look into Ernest Hemingway's war literature. Followed by this, the third chapter will shed light on Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon to understand what prompt them to produce such profound anti-war novels and poetry despite of strict political situation during that time. After having read these authors of different background, style and Nawar 2 nationality this study has found that World War I generated a platform, a unison where all the barriers transcended, the concept of nationalism, patriotism and bravery were redefined, challenged and thrown away. Nawar 3
" Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, "-Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind. The literature of war is a literature of paradoxes, the greatest of which is the fact that it comments continuously on its own failure. War writers often lament their incapacity to describe the realities of armed combat, the inexpressible nature of the subject matter, the inadequacy of language, and the inability of their audiences to understand. Tim O'Brien writes of the war he experienced in Vietnam: " There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. " From ancient Nordic ballads to Masai folk songs or Red Indian sagas, war has always been a predominate theme in literature. Zafon in The Shadow of the Wind portrays a war ravaged Barcelona and comments, " There's something about that period that's epic and tragic " for like the Old English Elegiac poetries, the Arthurian Romances, Gorky's Mother or Tolstoy's War and Peace, the literature of the Great Wars have altered human perception and the very fabrics of literature. However, we witness a distinct line between the literature of both world wars. The Second Great War threatened the humankind like never before. It was a manmade crisis which threw us to the brink of extinction, and thus displaying the futility of human existence. As humanity experienced the terror of the 'absurdity' of reality, the philosophy if 'nothing to be done' surfaced in their consciousness. This paper aims to evaluate the marked change in the form of poetry written in the two Great Wars and how far the Second World War was responsible for the advent of Modernism.
Amazonia Investiga, 2023
The aim of the article is to identify and arrange the patterns of influence of the consequences of the wars of the 20th century on literature as one of the characteristic manifestations of the socio-cultural activity of the community involved in destructive military actions, and the influence of these literary works on modernity. Methods. The research employed the following methods: collection and analysis of works of war literature, cross-sectional expert rating analysis, content analysis and drawing analytical conclusions. Results. The study was focused on two lists of literary works about the First and Second World Wars. According to the rankings, Erich Maria Remarque - Der Weg zurück (about the First World War) and Anne Frank - Het Achterhuis (about the Second World War) are the leaders. Stylistic dynamics showed a change from generalized moral reflections to personal experiences of military horrors. The results confirmed the impact of military conflicts on literature and its interaction with other sociocultural phenomena. Conclusions. The authors’ appeal in the war literature of World War II to the personal experiences of the potential reader through the mediation of autobiographical literary works contributes to a fundamental revision of the moral and ethical norms of the post-war society. The academic novelty is a comprehensive analysis of the impact of global military conflicts on European literature and their role in the modern world. The results of the study can be used in literary studies, education and cultural studies for a better understanding of the influence of military conflicts on literature and the formation of a humanistic worldview. The prospects for further research direction focus on increasing the sample of empirical data through content analysis of a larger number of master works of war literature. Keywords: autobiography, expert reader analysis, content analysis, global conflicts, literary reaction.
First World War in Literature: Reflections across the Genres
Literary Studies
War is a major theme in literature from ancient times to the contemporary world. Lyrics, ballads, tales, stories, all kinds of poetry and fictions, philosophical reflections and intellectual analyses have been composed and written about war all over the world in all periods of history. War is the result of conflicting human action and desire, too often it results out of atrocities and inhumanities and wrongful action or desire of one person or group of persons against others. War on many occasions in the long history of mankind has been the only option to salvage one’s dignity and enforce right order and values in society and community of nations and organized groups. In this sense war has proved the most important redress for restoring values, justice and dignity among right-minded people. The First World War that began raging in summer a century ago across the frontiers of Europe to cause havoc to much of the world in subsequent four years bears many features of this characterizat...
Germanic Review, 2024
This essay underscores the importance of seeking refuge in literary aesthetics by arguing that Goethe's concept of world literature was formulated in compensation for the shock of military defeat, political collapse, and foreign occupation. The refugee became a figure of identification in Goethe's writing in the 1790s and his Orientalist Nachdichtungen. The Goethean mode of reading distant literatures entails identifying with other writers who are often already marginalized within their own cultures. This manner of engaging with non-European texts refuses to establish a pantheon of great works precisely because it relies on a writerly interest in rediscovering one's own identity by reading foreign literature from a position of insecurity and weakness. The goal of reading is always the reconstruction of the self through a strange text. With its eagerness to establish a monumental cultural figure, the nineteenth and early twentieth-century canon marginalized precisely those unGerman texts in which Goethe most effectively dismantled his own authorial status. Only with the demise of colonial empires and the defeat of Nazi Germany did a more modest, anti-hegemonic mode of reading remerge.