Writing and Fighting: Literature of the First World War 100 Years On
ENG 144A
Fall 2014
MW 1.15-3.05
Lathrop 292
Dr. Alice Staveley
Margaret Jacks Hall 328
650-723-0131
Office Hours: M 11-1; F 2-3 & by appointment
The ‘war to end all wars’ began a century ago in August 1914. Most of the men who fought and died during the 1914-1918 campaigns were, as are you, on the threshold of adulthood between ages 18 and 22. You enter and progress through these four years of undergraduate study during a different cultural and geographic era, but the legacies of that devastating slaughter remain with us. In this course, we will study the historical contexts of the conflict in light of the literary representations of crisis and incomprehension borne by the clashing of imperial powers. Literature has always found in war a compelling subject matter: just think of Homer or Virgil. But what was it about the unique devastation and military configurations of the ‘Great War’ that caused poets and writers to create an entirely new form of verse and novel? How did memoir writing, journalism, and essay writing change under the pressure to articulate the inexpressible? How did the ‘homefront’ dialogue with the front lines? The soldier with the civilian? We will read a wide variety of genres, from life writing to newspaper reports, from poetry to novels, from historical assessments to the changing archive of war correspondence and poetry offered by advances in digital preservation to help us understand why writing takes many forms in the face of implacable conflict, and is in its own way a fight against oblivion.
Syllabus
Week One: The War Poets
M 22 Sept: Introductions + poetry analysis
W 24 Sept: Wilfred Owen: “Strange Meeting”, “Dulce et Decorum Est”,“Spring Offensive”, “Exposure”, “Disabled”, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
*Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Chapter 1 “A Satire of Circumstance”
Week Two: The War Poets and Genetic Texts
M 29 Sept. Reading Owen’s drafts
Siegfried Sassoon, “Repression of War Experience”, “Blighters”, “To His Dead Body”, “The Rear-Guard” “Dreamers
W 1 Oct.Isaac Rosenberg, “Break of Day in the Trenches,” “Louse Hunting,” “Returning, We Hear the Larks”
*Paul Fussell, Chapter 2 “The Troglodyte World”
Week Two: The Memoirists, Battlefront
M 6 October: Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That: An Autobiography (1929)
W 8 October: Graves, Goodbye to All That
Week Three:The Memoirists, Homefront
M 13 October: Vera Brittain: Testament of Youth (1933): Chs. 1-4
Letters between Vera & Roland:
W 15 October: Vera Brittain: Testament of Youth: Chs. 9-10
Week Four: War & Modernism
M 20 October: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
W 22 October: Mrs Dalloway
Week Five: War & Modernism
M 27 October: Mrs Dalloway
W 29 October: T. E. The Waste Land (1922)
Week Six: War & Modernism
M 3 November: Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (1925)
W 5 November: In Our Time
Week Seven: Short Fiction
M 10 November: Selections from The Penguin Book of First World War Stories
W 12 November: Continued.
Week Eight: War, Propaganda, and Photography & Film
M 17 November: Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
W 19 November: Survey of Recent Centenary Website documenting the War; Discussion of historiographic image-crafting of WWI
Thanksgiving Break
Week Nine: The War in the Contemporary Novel
1 December: Pat Barker, Regeneration
3 December: Pat Barker, Regeneration
Web Resources
Evaluation
Class Participation: 20%
Weekly Reader responses: 20%
Paper One: 25% (Due 23 October)
Paper Two: 35% (Due 5 December)
Fulfills Ways of Thinking: Aesthetic & Interpretative Inquiry