English 338 Course Outline

Rats, Gas & Shell-Shock: the WWI Causes of Literary Modernism

The First World War is a period of history with which we have yet to come to terms, and which continues to haunt our culture. - The Literary Encyclopedia

Life and death alike in trench warfare were unbearable to a degree that exceeded the existing capacity of literary imagination, outside poetry, to express it sufficiently. Indeed, Patricia Barker’s 1993 Regeneration trilogy represents the medical symptoms of shell-shock -- permanent mutism and stammering – as evidence that trench warfare simply exceeded humanity’s capacity to verbalise its horror. In this course we will read and critically examine several now-neglected masterpieces of literary modernism, and see how each in its own artistic terms represents a struggle to find and apply new literary devices capable of adequately representing – and perhaps soothing – the fragmenting effect on national consciousness of countless shell-shocked survivors of the trench horrors. Aided by selections from the work of some of the great First World War poets, including Sassoon and Owen, who, writing as they did from front-line experience, more immediately recorded those terrors, like gas warfare and shell shock, not even named before their devastation was accomplished, we will work from the thesis that literary modernism is WWI set to fiction.NOTE: In addition to the Canadian film adaptation of Barker’s Regeneration, clips from the BBC comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth, set in World War One, will give dramatic background and satiric analysis of the events. Testimony to the unresolved status of World War One in Britain, laughter turned to cathartic sorrow when first broadcast of Blackadder’s poignant conclusion produced national weeping.

Woolf, Virginia Jacob's Room
Forester, C.S. The General
West, Rebecca The Return of the Soldier
Ford, Madox Ford Parade's End
Waugh, Evelyn Vile Bodies
Silkin, John, ed. Penguin Book of First World War Poetry

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
10% Class participation
10% Class presentation
20% Mid-term paper (approx. 2500 words)
20% Group project
40% Final paper (approx. 3500 words)