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The Great War and Modern Memory

Terms in this set (26)

suggested as a by-product of the war
irony
causalities of the war
neo-romanticism of Brooke and the Georgian poets
author
Paul Fussell
what does modern memory refer to?
writings of a group of men drawn largely from a small fragment of the English middle class
how many war cemeteries in France/ Belgium?
2500
Who does Sassoon owe debt to his satire?
Hardy's pre-war ironies of Satires of Circumstance
-relation to war in these were still hidden below the horizon
irony of the deaths
8 million people destroyed because of deaths of two persons, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his consort
Lord Derby's Scheme
a genteel form of conscription in October 1915
When when conscription brought in?
Beginning of 1916 with the passing of the military service act
Passchendaele
July 31st 1917
-370,000 British dead and wounded
-literally drowned in the mud
Christianity and sacrifice
self abnegation
Britain and previous wars
had not known a major war for over a century
no war between the Great Powers since 1871 so no man in the prime of his life knew what war was like
Recruitment poster example (family)
depicting a worried father being asked by his children "Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?"
Summer of 1914
most idyllic for many year
-became a permanent symbol of anything innocently but irrecoverably lost
language
raised and feudal, high diction, euphemism
Class after the war
General strike of 1926
electoral reversal in 1945 to Attlee's labour party
theatre of war
conscripted armies whose members are only temporarily playing their ill learned parts, enthusiastic but unprepared boy actors impersonating soldiers, trying to look like Tennysonian heroes
Two purposes of the pastoral
1) fully gauge the calamities, standard of measurement
2) protecting oneself against them, pastoral oasis
war and sexuality/ love
language of military attack e.g. "impacts, thrust" overlap with sexual importunity
- Exhalation felt, pleased to expose himself to mortal danger
Defence of the Realm Act (1914)
-designed to help prevent invasion and to keep morale at home high, imposed censorship of journalism and of letters coming home from the front line, Flying a kite or lighting a bonfire could attract Zeppelins and, after rationing was introduced in 1918, feeding wild animals was a waste of food.
o used to control civilian behaviour e.g. regulating alcohol consumption and food supplies. Public House opening times were also reduced to 12.00 noon to 2.30 pm and 6.30 to 9.30 pm
Owen and religion
- Raised Anglican evangelical by mother and devout believer in youth. Assistant to a victor. But became disillusioned
Owen and sexuality
- Tender intimacy he contemplates, physical details, profound pity
- Either identification with a homogeneous group of men or single unfortunate male
- Features of the palpable body
- Sensuous devise of "his...(body part)
- In Anthem for Doomed Youth generalised accessories of funeral services supremely irrelevant next to hands and eyes of boys
- Male fellowship, fuses the paternal with the erotic, homoerotic warmth
Analysis of Break of Day in the Trenches
- Begins by finding a scene looking normal only to discover that there is something disturbing in it, something odd
- If the sheep is a symbol of the pastoral, the rat is the creature most appropriate to the demonic
- But this rat is charming, well-travelled, sophisticated
- Rat perfectly aware of the irony in the transposition of human and animal roles that the trench scene has brought about
- Poppy behind ear roughly in the place where the bullet would enter is stick head above the parapet
- Poppies grow because nourished on the blood of the death
- Hiding in the hole, the way a rat is supposed to do
- As "pulled" death is coming, destined for the blood to run out completely
- Ironic word of safe in the penultimate line
- Speaker highly conscious of his own morality and the brevity of time
- Sound play "just a little white" to "just a little while"
Charles Sorley and first hints of realism
- Persistent subtleties and ambivalences which denote deep thought about the coming issues
- Confronts the bleakness of death with characteristic honesty and vision in "when you see millions of the mouthless dead"
- Possible direct reference to Brook in the line "say not soft things as other men have said"
- Abrupt break in rhythm mid-line, monosyllabic
- Intellectual questioning
- Deliberate ambivalence
- Foreshadows the post-war developments in poetry
Epigrammatic effect
through tightly rhymed metre (concise, clever, amusing
Isaac Rosenberg
- detached yet more intense vision
o Crown of thorns as visual imagery for the rusty barbed wire
o Describes specific dead in deliberately impersonal and unemotional terms
o Culmination of the relationship between man and nature arrives when the bodies of the dead return to the soil
- Capacity to realise a deeply felt experience with an intense but detached poetic vision without overt moral comment
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