Home>Courses>300 Level Courses>354
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English 354a |
Professor Finley |
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T 7:30-10 |
HUIII |
This course will study the responses of literature to the personal, historical, and spiritual catastrophe of the Great War, 1914-1918. Our theoretical center will be the study of the processes of memory, of the complex structure, both recuperative and disfiguring, of recollection, especially those elements in our human nature that must receive and respond to rending loss, that must remember, and in re-membering mourn. We will focus, in particular, on the experiences (and the recollection consequent to it) of the English army at the battles of the Somme (1916) and at Passchendaele (1917).
We will begin with the elegiac voice and savage ironies of Thomas Hardy's poems, with selections from two collections, Satires of Circumstance (1914) and Moments of Vision (1917). We will then proceed through a series of works, written either during the war, or sometime after as memoirs of that five-year interval. These will include the very different poetry of Rupert Brooke (d. 1915), Wilfrid Owen (d. 1918), Issac Rosenberg (d. 1918), Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden. We will read the autobiographies of Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933), Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That (1929), the remarkable diary of Edwin Campion Vaughn (d. 1931), Some Desperate Glory (only discovered and published in 1981), and parts of Ernst Toller's Eine Jugend in Deutschland (1933), as well as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1927). Novels will include Ford Madox Ford's A Man Could Stand Up (1926) from the quartet, Parade's End, and Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune (1930). In addition to these texts, primary sources will also include a xeroxed anthology (gathered from the archives of the Imperial War Museum) of poetry by women, much of it published in small ephemeral journals or as broadsheets during the course of the war.
Two texts about war, about its literature and its influence upon the ongoing history and culture of European society, will accompany our reading: John Keegan's The Face of Battle (1976), and Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). We will also review modern and contemporary theories of traumatic memory.
Requirements: Seminar attendance, class, 3 brief writing exercises (1-2 pages), which require close reading and explication of the text, and a concluding long essay (15-20 pages) or web project. This course will be taught with a multimedia component; students will be encouraged to contribute, as one part of their long projects, to the course's website.
Prerequisite: Two 2-- level courses in English or consent of instructor