First World War Literature: Rats, Gas & Shell-Shock.

Field Trip Group Photo

2006-08-04T00:36:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of classfellow H.G.H.

Class Presentations Post: A Resource

2006-08-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

The post I've maintained containing your Individual Presentations was designed to be a good research resource for specific details related to Modernism - hopefully a Help as you work on your term papers, due August 8th in my department mailbox.

Eveleyn Waugh's Prophecy

2006-08-01T18:52:00.000-07:00

Adam Fenwyck-Symes, writing as "Mr. Chatterbox" creates a person -- Mrs. Andrew Quest -- in his column for the sole purpose of writing gossip about her. In 1930, when Waugh wrote Vile Bodies, this was high satire.
It is now real-life.

Sony pays $1.5m over fake critic.
A judge has finalised a settlement in which film studio Sony will pay $1.5m (£850,000) to film fans after using a fake critic to praise its movies. In 2001, ads for films including Hollow Man and A Knight's Tale quoted praise from a reviewer called David Manning, who was exposed as being invented.

Modernist Pop Music

2006-07-31T00:33:00.000-07:00

Classfellow Ray curses me for making him unable to enjoy his iPod without thinking "Modernism," as follows ....

Yesterday, I had an urge to listen to a song I somewhat liked a few years ago ... I put it to my iPod, and went towork. While on the bus, I had a good chance to listen to the lyrics and then it hits me: "...this is Modernism! In fact, this is 'Vile Bodies'! The golden road... the living in Edwardian decadence without Edwardian reasons. Leaving suddenly ... the lost generation and those who just left to the war and never came back. Driving off in a car and it breaking down ... Agatha. "Where were they going without ever knowing the way "... walking straight into WWII. Here's a URL to the music video on YouTube, I hope you enjoy it. Honestly, 9am on a Sunday, half awake on a bus to work, and the biggest idea in my head was Modernism ....

Guilty, guilty, guilty!

Modernism & the Impossible Present

2006-07-29T15:24:00.000-07:00

Classfellow Thor sends along this useful poetic definition of Modernism:

"[M]odernism is the struggle of the future to free itself from the clinging hands of a dying past"- from "Modernism as a World-Wide Movement." A. Eustace Haydon, The Journal of Religion, January 1925.

You will notice the support this lends to my repeated thesis in lecture about Modernism's troubled position vis à vis the temporal present -- yet one more concept that analogises to shell-shock.

Imagism & Vorticism (& Facism)

2006-07-28T20:06:00.000-07:00

Here are the links I mentioned in lecture: of Imagism, and a scan of the Blast vanity publications of 1914-15.
Let me repeat that I entirely reprudiate, deplore & deprecate the loathesome and inexcusible anti-Semitism of Ezra Pound that so evidently animated the Blast tract.

Term Paper: Creative Option

2006-07-28T19:36:00.000-07:00

For those classfellows who are considering the creative-writing option for the Term Paper, it will be necessary to have me sign off on your proposed format in advance. The proposal must take the form of a set of failure standards -- applying the falsification concept from experimental science, where a theory is ranked as scientific only when it is capable of being falsified in a reproducible trial.

So, if you chose to submit a creative paper or project for your Term assignment, in either essay or point form, list the full set of criteria by which your project can be gauged to have failed. To wit,

if the project does not advance an academic thesis
if the project does not identifiably incorporate material from relevent scholarship
if the project fails to relate directly to some number of the primary course texts
if the project fails to represent and demonstrate advanced understanding of the central ideas of the course
&c, &c.

This criteria requirement arises from creative submissions in previous courses, where creativity was more than once mistaken (by the student author) for open license. At the same time, it has proven to give the student a helpful planning template and a good stimulus to .... productivity.

The creative project must be accompanied by a concise scholarly essay justifying the academic validity of the project.

Loosely War Related

2006-07-25T02:07:00.000-07:00

Any intrepid netheads amongst you able to determine whether this article is a hoax or the truth? Headshaking Headline: Nobel Peace Prize Winner to Schoolchildren: 'I would love to kill George Bush'...

Update: the person at least is real: her name is Betty Williams, shown here with the Dalai Lama.

Term Paper: Reflections

2006-07-22T14:33:00.000-07:00

Seminar Thursday included a fecund roundtable discussion on means by which the Term paper -- indeed, any term paper -- can be engaging, memorable and productive of scolarship rather than a mere chore. A variety of specific ideas were outlined:

reduce the word count but build consultative revisions into the full assignment.
in small groups, exchange draughts, offer oral critique, and work up an edit schema.
use alternatives to the scholarly essay form.
varieties of "take away student autonomy & set minute criteria in stone."

From the Instructorial perspective, all the ideas reduce neatly to two simple dicta:

"Use office hours."
"Chose a topic from what excites, angers, puzzles or impresses you in the course material."

Don't try to be scholarly when you conceive the assignment. Look back on the course and find something that engages you for whatever reason. Then, find the tightest and most concrete idea possible and turn it into a thesis: "I think this is true." Draught in roughest form an introductory paragraph, or simply sketch a plan of development in point form on a sheet of paper and bring in to an Office Hour for consultation.

The form that the paper will take is then open for mutual agreement. The venerable canons of scholarship provide a scale of formal expression that gives wide scope for creativity & inspiration. Again, the type to which the paper adheres is settled during the individual consultation that Office Hours allow.

On the matter of secondary sources, my dictum is that connection with an established body and tradition of scholarhip is what elevates us above journalism. A classfellow sends along the following advice, given by Dr. Kate Scheel:

1. Present my own idea regarding the question / thesis / course work etc.
2. Find a [related] textual example .... from the course
books.
3. Support this idea with a secondary resource [researched in the Library stacks.]
I am keeping [thus] my own voice, providing appropriate examples, and crediting my work through scholarly examples. This may seem trivial ... however, I know many people to whom this was [....never] clearly and simply explained.

Term Paper Book

2006-07-20T23:42:00.000-07:00

As I said in lecture today, I am interested in setting a permament record of our course together by having the Term papers bound -- with Introduction (by the present writer) w. Table of Contents. Please believe that this will be something to which you will refer warmly as the years pass. However, I do understand that some may not be comfortable having their efforts thus immortalised. Accordingly, to ensure that no-one feel pressured, I will wait until after the Final Grades have been posted for the course and then have you submit a copy of your paper by email as you wish, or not. I am hoping that the cost from Duplicating will be nominal: I'll let you all know.
Update: Campus ReproGraphics quotes the cost as twenty dollars -- with a group photograph on the cover ;--)

Modernist Diction

2006-07-18T15:00:00.000-07:00

The recent article that I discussed in lecture today as an elaboration of one cause of elevated diction in High Modernist literature is one James Miller's "Is Bad Writing Necessary" and can be read online at the Lingua Franca mirror site here.

Vocabulary in Literary Modernism

2006-07-17T01:02:00.000-07:00

Remember to be contemplating, for discussion in class Tuesday, a likely scholarly explanation for the esoteric vocabulary encountered in High Moderist texts like Madox Ford's Parade's End.

Term Paper

2006-07-17T00:52:00.000-07:00

The Term Paper is due in just over three weeks. The criteria are as specified in the syllabus: "Open topic, due no later than August 7th at midnight in the Instructor's Department mailbox." This effectively gives over four full days past the final class of term. Please note that the midnight deadline is the latest time for the assignment to be submitted: you can hand it in earlier if you do not wish to come up to campus at midnight!

Provided the essay has a scholarly thesis, conforms to the English Department Style Guide, and develops material and ideas directly presented in our course, let your intellect & imagination be your guide. I will have extended Office Hours in the last week of term for in-depth consultation.

Bring "Return of the Soldier"

2006-07-09T15:51:00.000-07:00

A reminder to bring your copy of Rebecca West's Return of the Soldier to class this week.

Group Project

2006-07-09T13:58:00.000-07:00

I hope your Group Projects are coming along well. We'll have time set aside in seminar to do some work in real time (& real place!) This is a good opportunity to review the assignment criteria.

On the last day of term, August 3rd, we will play "Deal or No Deal?" (a variation of the Monty Hall Problem) pitting each group against the others with myself as genial host. By July 27th in seminar each group will submit to me a binder containing a single sheet from each group member on which will be written five questions [Update: & their direct & comprehensive answers.] These will form a pool of questions from which I will conduct the Quiz-Show (naturally, your group will not be asked any of your own questions.)

The assignment will be graded sixty percent on the quality of your submitted questions and fourty percent on your relative success in the Quiz-Show. The questions must relate directly to Course material: texts primary and secondary, lectures, and seminar discussion & presentations. As an example of specificity, I offered the following: "Name one of the two relations that General Curzon dismissed as aides de camp for incompetancy." Of generality, this: "Virginia Woolf is addressing her fiction to what aspect or concern of literary modernism in the passage in Jacob's Room which represents the class system using the seating at the Opera house?"

Your questions should be tricky enough to challenge, but fairly, your opponent groups, and thus maximise your chance of winning the Quiz Show. The format of the Show will have your Host periodically offering you the opportunity to take instead one of two or three alternatives from your original answer to a given Question.

Best wishes.

"Paulo-Post" & Shellshock

2006-07-08T00:23:00.000-07:00

An excellent insight from classfellow Jaason:

I was wondering if Ford's use of the timeshift and the paulo-post could also be linked thematically to shell-shock. For example, Chris (Return of the Soldier) returned from the war and was just thrown into his old life and then forced to fill in the details. Also, when Tietjens first comes home from the war, the reader does not know that he has shell-shock and it is only slowly revealed as we read on and the details are filled in. Perhaps Ford wants us to have a taste of what shell-shock is like and achieves it by using this technique.

Ford, Freud, Modernism & Fragmentation

2006-07-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

A highly relevant book that you might be interested in is available through this ebrary link from our Library homepage. Its title declares its relevancy: Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War.
Two characteristic passages to get your attention.

But it is hard to talk about ‘modernism’ (or history) as a homogeneous mass, as will emerge in this Introduction. In my approach to Ford, then, I also fragment modernism itself. I focus on aspects of the modernist aesthetic that are particularly relevant to him and to his work; in so doing, I also demonstrate the fact that there is more to modernism than meets the eye. The prevailing wisdom concerning modernism and fragmentation (the ‘pattern’) is challenged in what follows. Ford, an advocate and cultivator of key modernist techniques, both uses these techniques to represent the fragmented experience and perception of modern life (in a text like The Good Soldier) and counters them (in what I call his positive fictions, like The Half Moon’).
Steven Marcus calls the relation between psychoanalysis and narrative writing ‘an ancient and venerable one’,11 and Freud himself stated in Studies on Hysteria that ‘it still strikes myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories’.12 As Marcus then deduces, ‘On this reading, human life is, ideally, a connected and coherent story, with all the details in explanatory place, and with everything [. . .] accounted for, in its proper causal or other sequence. And inversely, illness amounts at least in part to suffering from an incoherent story or an inadequate narrative account of oneself’ (p. 61).
Haslam, Sara. Fragmenting Modernism : Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War . Manchester , GBR p21 . http://site.ebrary.com/lib/sfu/Doc?id=10071290&ppg=34 Copyright © 2002. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.

Somme: 90th Anniversary - "Lions led by Donkeys."

2006-07-01T11:36:00.000-07:00

On the Somme, some 73,000 British dead were never identified; at Verdun, the "unknown" are buried in regiments.
Paul Stanway.

Canada Day this year is the 90th Anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. The Canadian Press news wire leads with this story:

OTTAWA (CP) - Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Governor General Michaelle Jean began Canada Day celebrations Saturday by taking part in a wreath-laying ceremony at the National War Memorial. The event marked the 90th anniversary of the Battles of the Somme and Beaumont-Hamel. It was "very, very moving," Harper later said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

From the centre-left CBC to the centre right Edmonton Sun, an ideological range of Canadian media support my idea that WWI is loathed irrespective of a person's view toward war in general.

On Canada Day in 1916, some 100,000 soldiers of the British Empire climbed out of their trenches near the River Somme in northern France and advanced at walking pace towards the German line - only to meet death on a mind-boggling, industrial scale, in a futile contest that would redefine the meaning of slaughter. By the end of the day the British forces had suffered 60,000 casualties, including 20,000 dead - Canadians among them. At Beaumont-Hamel, the 1st Newfoundland Regiment was cut to pieces by the German machine-guns, with more than 700 casualties in half an hour.

An interesting video reflection of the battle itself can be found on the BBC as well as a useful study into the origins of WWI. There is also a meaningful article on Britain's Oldest WWI survivor as well as this remarkable contemporaneous letter. There are powerful memorials being held in the north of France by the British.

Revisionist accounts of the Somme are also available, in fairness sake, including an article with an audio recording of the son of the man responsible for the unimaginable carnage effected -- at a place, it must be said, against Haig's judgement -- merely to distract from an imbecilic French military action elsewhere.
I did find this one passage arresting, resonant with our Forester text:

Were Haig and his generals really "donkeys"? The evidence suggests not. Haig lost 58 of his fellow generals, killed or dying of wounds while leading from the front during the four years of war. Three died in the Somme in the first few days. So the General Melchett image of Blackadder - of arrogant Generals safe back at headquarters - is unfounded. They were brave...

The Fort Langley Graveyard Garden Party

2006-06-30T09:45:00.000-07:00

Sunshine, spiders, Seeger, Johnny Walker, Rupert Brooke, really old trees, and a Rendezvous with Death.
Thanks Dr. Ogden for another memorable and unconventional literary experience!
[Posted by Pigeon]

Thursday Is Reading Day

2006-06-27T16:36:00.000-07:00

As announced on our delightful Field Trip today, this Thursday's seminar (June 29th) is designated as a Reading Break. With the long weekend, this gives you an excellent opportunity to finish the wonder that is Parade's End. See you all in class next Tuesday.

(No, there aren't any World Cup matches on Thursday!)

If any of you with digital photographs of our trip, would you consider forwarding them to be posted on the blog?

Tuesday Field Trip

2006-06-24T23:39:00.000-07:00

For those going to and from campus, we will meet in the "L" lot behind the Library -- by the overnight book drop -- at the start of class, eleven thirty and we will return there by the end of class, twenty-past one. For those going straight there, we should be at Glover Road and 96th Avenue just past noon.

My plan is to spend our time in the area of the memorial tree and read & discuss some of the First World War poetry.

Looking forward to it ....

Mid-Term Essay Topics

2006-06-15T23:58:00.000-07:00

Here are three topics to chose from for the mid-term paper, twenty-five hundred words, due in lecture July 11th.

1.] There is a degree of attention in the modernist novels that we are studying in our course to the class system in England that, insofar as the general understanding of the literary movement is concerned, seems surprising. Using the many insights provided in lecture, present your argument for a unitary explanation of the prominent treatment that the English class structure receives from any three of our writers of modernism.

2.] Address yourself in your essay to two related paradoxes – one vexing, the other humourous – which must necessarily confound – or, at least, should confound – any honest and competently knowledgeable modernist scholarship. One is that a coherent, rational and tidy academic understanding is being pursued of a movement founded on an attitude deprecatory toward tidy resolution and closed systems by a disparate membership having contradictory designs, principles and practices. Two is the multifareous metaphysic asserted by modernists on one hand and the unprecedented Titanarchy that its creators formed themselves into on the other. (From the standpoint of years, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the most important concern of Freud, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, & many far lesser, & more local Modernists was inescapably .... Freud, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, &c.)

3.] Your course Instructor argues -- persuasively and with exceptional elegance -- that World War One is the defining event of Modernism. Using a minimum of any two course authors, support or rebut this argument by means of a comparison between representations of pre-War Edwardianism and the Great War.

The Life and Times of Edward James Sellwood – as told by Pigeon’s mother.

2006-06-15T23:00:00.000-07:00

I never really heard my father complain, I think he must have been a fairly good natured soldier. He was underage when he signed up. Born in March, 1897, he was 17 in 1914.

He fought in Europe until he was wounded in the shoulder – a bullet went straight through. He was sent back to England to recuperate. When he was on the street in England strangers would come up to him and ask why he wasn’t at the front.

We have heard of the soldiers in the trenches on both sides stopping fighting on Christmas Day and taking part in a soccer game, resuming the war the next day. My Dad said that on Christmas Day where he was the men stopped the bloodshed, got out of the trenches and offered cigarettes to each other. The officers were angry because they felt this behavior showed the enemy where the Allied trenches were.

Dad was passing the time chatting to a fellow soldier...
click to read more

Modernism Is ... OCEL

2006-06-13T11:25:00.000-07:00

From the Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by Margaret Drabble:

MODERNISM: an omnibus term for a number of tendencies in the arts which were prominent in the first half of the twentieth century: in English literature it is particularily associated with the writings of V. Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Pound Joyce, Yeats F.M. Ford & Conrad. Broadly, modernism reflects the impact upon literature of the psychology of Freud and the anthropology of J.G. Frazer as expressed in The Golden Bough.... it was marked by a persistent experimentalism; it is 'the tradition of the new' in Harold Rosenberg's phrase. It rejected the traditional .... Although so diverse in its manifestation, it was recognised as representing as H. Read wrote (ArtNow, 1933) , 'an abrupt break with all tradition ...'Modernist works (for instance, the poetry of Elot & Pound) may have a tendency to dissolve into a chaos of sharp atomistic impressions.

"Modernism Is ...." --- Individual Presentations

2006-06-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

I will use this post to collect the summaries of our individual class presentations, as an effective resource for our understanding of the wild & contradictory complexities of Modernism.

Modernism is ... the literary evolution of the traditional narrative.
1) Modernist literature does not subscribe to the traditional narratives of previous literature eras
2) Modernism brought a new way of writing
3) Stream-of-Consciousness
4) Symbolism as the linking force of ideas and narrative in the story
5) Deep philosophical themes soaked into the subtext of the story

Modernism is .... the confident assertion of uncertainty.
1. Modernist Confidence: High Modernism – ‘knowing everything about everything.’ Sense of superiority. ‘Legends in their own minds’
2. Perhaps this outward confidence is merely masking an underlying uncertainty/anxiety, for modernists seem equally concerned, if not intensely preoccupied, with the unknowable / incomprehensible.
3. Look at what modernists are replacing traditional ideas with: Modernists are NOT replacing certainty with certainty (old clarity with new-found clarity), but rather, replacing old certainties with ambiguities.
4. The use of a broken/fragmented style, to convey broken/fragmented ideas, could be seen as reflecting a state of mind that is similarly broken/fragmented.
5.Modernist writing is intensely self-conscious/self-reflexive

Modernism is....
1) past, present and future
2) in a state of constant change
3) adaptable
4) undefinable
5) individual

Modernism is .... Images of the First World War

1. If Modernism is an attempt to break from the past, images of World War 1 illustrate this through pictures of drastic changes in warfare.
-Forester, Pg. 25, 133 (changing opinions)
2. The literary fragmentation that pervades passages of Modernist literature we have read (for example, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room) is physically manifested in pictures of fragmented bodies.
-Forester, Pg. 52 (fragmented bodies, blown apart in warfare)
3. Images of “child soldiers” and dead youth are reflected in the poetry of World War 1 poets and their messages of despair, confusion and utter shell-shock through their immediate lived experiences.
-Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” (193)
4. The loss of innocence (which can be perceived as the “golden period” of Edwardianism) is evident in each image of intense suffering and sadness.
-Siegfried Sassoon, “Counter-Attack” (129)
5. If Modernists are the epitome of self-confidence (or as we discussed last class in our colloquium, perhaps false confidence), this is contrasted by the feelings of inadequacy, fear and passive femininity experienced by the soldiers of World War 1.
-Forester, Pg. 68

Modernism is .... a time for luxurious garden parties.
5 key points to hosting a garden party:
1) Flowers: roses, daisies, lilies, karakas (tree)
2) Food: sandwiches (cream cheese, lemon-curd), cream puffs, cakes, passion
fruit ices, coffee, tea
3) Clothing: hats, dresses; "her black hat trimmed with gold daisies and
long black velvet ribbons¨ (256)
4) Amenities: marquee, tables, chairs, tennis court, waiters to serve food &
drinks
5) Activities: singing with the piano, strolling around the garden, badminton, croquet, chats.

(Literary) Modernism is .... the written attempt to take the chaotic & fragmented pieces of life and society before, during, and after the war, and piece them together in order to construct the "modern".
-With all the turmoil and chaos that the First World War brought, modernist writers attemtped to bring order to the modern world through their literature.-Modernist writers attempted to capture the driving force of life and place it in text.
-Modernist writers attempted to portray a realistic account of life duringtheir time. The past was the past, the present was unstable, the future was unknown. Their writing reflects these opinions both in style and content.
-Modernist writers attempted to begin rebuilding the destroyed past into the modern present through recognition that the past had been destroyed.
-Through their new way of writing, modernist writers challenged readers to search for and accept a new definition of "modern."

Modernism is .... not a radical break from the past but rather another period in the unified timeline of history.
-Modernism is a part of history in that it has roots in movements that preceded it and it cannot be understood fully without an understanding of its precursors.
- Modernism is revolutionary in that it is an attempt to overthrow the status quo and improve the world with radical developments in the arts, such as literature and art
- Modernism, like secular humanism and the Enlightenment, prizes individual reason and thought, the ability of man to shape his world above all traditions, superstitions and institutions (ie) monarchy and church
- Modernism is radical in that it prizes imagination over reason and this is one of its improvements on the past
- Modernism is a part of an age-old human quest to create to create the most perfect world that can be found – that is why it is called a revolution as it recognizes the failures of previous periods and attempts to improve upon them.

Modernism is ... real life.
1) Life in modernity is unlike anything experienced before.
a) WWI and trench warfare.
2) Real life in the way we think.
a) a more accurate way to portray reality through stream of consciousness.
3) Living in fragmentation.
a) recovery (from shellshock) through engagement with texts.
4) the Freudian perspective is the new reality.
a) analysis to find meaning and explanation in life.
5) The end of the ideal; the new reality is materialistic, driven by results.
a) from virtue to value, a punctured and deflated Edwardian society.

Modernism is .... Radical Music
1) Modernism is the formation of numerous symbiotic relationships amongst different mediums like music and literature. Music andliterature merged together through Arnold Schoenberg and Stefan George.
2) Modernism is music by composer Arnold Schoenberg, who reevaluated harmony, melody, and form. Sought alternatives to previously engrained technique. Things like tonal ambiguity, dissonance and musical abstraction changed the shape of music. Modernist music described by many audiences as radical and inaccessible.
3) Modernism is an interrogation and diagnosis of the individual mind occurring collectively amongst the arts. Schoenberg was inspired towrite the settings of poems by Stefan George because of this. Literary modernism took shape in Germany with Stefan George July 12 1868-December 4, 1933.
4) Modernism is worldly. Schoenberg and George capture the avante-garde, abstract, self conscious style of modernism in music and literature despite geographical distance to Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, and Conrad. Illustrates an amalgamation of mediums over the concepts of modernism throughout the world.
5) Modernism is coming to grips with how great the artist thinks they are. For both the composer (Schoenberg) and poet (George) focus shifts to being less on extrinsic presentation (for the audience or reader) and more on the intrinsic understanding of interrogating their own reality.

Modernism is .... Inspiration.

1. My modernists were creating the new and what caused them to change was time. Something came and it was new and modernist authors had to find new ways of expressing themselves in their literature.

2. We have a class dedicated to modernism and we are inspired to developour own ideas and create meanings of the word. EX: our class colloquium and with that we came to different ideas andconclusions if any at all. The presentations that we had to do for class were also inspired by the huge term “modernism.” We had to go and find ourown meanings and the class developed many different ideas.

3. Modernism is a historical artifact. Modernism is an inspirational tool to keep that time period alive. A sense of never being able to return to that or that it will never be the same because time has passed. Even though time has passed does not necessarily mean that modernism has lost its credibility. It might become even more elusive through time. It gets better the more we study it. EX: Modernism was a way to express a certain emotion that can only be captured at that time. Pure modernists were modernists of that time and canonly truly be understood at that time. As we’re studying Modernism it is only a fragment in the year 2006 which is almost a false modernism but it does not deter are pursuit of the meaning.

4. A new form of expression. There were different styles that themodernist writers started to explore. The use of language is different. There is no longer the simple narrative but rather a more deeper look intothe human mind.

5. Modernist writers were more aware of themselves. They draw inspiration from themselves and more faith in the self too. - the unflinching confidence (arrogance) of the modernists- They inspire themselves because of their greatness - we need to understand the author’s lives/motivations to understand their work- without the authors there would be no text and without modernism there would be no texts that were written in this new form.

Modernism is ... the revival of the "New Woman" controversy.

Victorian novelist Eliza Lynn Linton's description of the "Girl of the Period" corresponds to
the "New Woman" in literary modernism.
1.) The physical appearance of the New Woman in Modernism is similar to the image of the New Woman in the Victorian Age (Sylvia, Parade's End).
2.) Both versions of the New Woman shamefully discard ideals of family and loyalty in marriage (Sylvia, Parade's End; Kitty, The Return of the Soldier).
3.) Nature and the pastoral life are glorified over the image of the modern woman (Kitty versus Margaret, The Return of the Soldier).
4.) In Victorian and Modernist literature, feminine pacifism is ideal (Lady Emily, The General).
5.) Superficial beauty is disapproved of (Kitty, The Return of the Soldier). The revival of the female anti-hero contradicts the claim that Modernism supports the rejection of the past because the "New Woman" was a movement derived from the Victorian era.
Further reading of Linton's "The Girl of the Period" can be found at
http://www.wwnorton.com/nto/victorian/topic_2/linton.htm

Modernism is .... Horses

1.] The role of the horse in warfare changed drastically in World War One.

2.] The horse is a metaphorical animal, representing the change from Edwardianism to modernism.

3.] In Parade's End, the horse is described as having both feminine and masculine features, representing an ambiguous time.

4.] The bit and the horse's mouth if of great significance, symbolizing the power men have upon women.

5.] The horse represents a capitalist culture, in which profits can be madeor lost due to the quality, pedigree, and health of the horse.

Modernism is…an attack on the manner in which God is viewed and interpreted.
(My points come to you not in the traditional five-point format, but rather, as a collection of useful information.)
- Biblical Modernism (a modernist movement originating from within the church) results in the suspicion of unchallenged doctrines and ideologies while placing more emphasis on the individual, internal narrative.
- The goal of modernism is not necessarily to destroy religion, but to view Jesus and the Bible in new ways which allow the application of personal judgment. Biblical Modernism “is not a continuation of the traditional theology of Christianity, but rather a rediscovery of the historical Jesus, and an attempt to organize Christian devotion in relation to him rather than
in relation to the standardized doctrines about him.” (E. Vanderlaan, "Modernism and Historic Christianity," The Journal of Religion, 1925)
- Modernism is a threat to orthodox Christianity because it threatens the rigid doctrines and authoritative structures that are inherent in the religion. During the rise of Biblical Modernism, the church took numerous steps in an attempt at eradicating the threat.
- In Literary Modernism, the individualistic human identity is constructed through internal narratives which deal with perceptions and interpretations of events rather than concrete descriptions of them.
- Although biblical allusions appear throughout many modernist texts, these allusions often lack specific religious context. In other words, many allusions merely serve to reference facets of the bible which are portrayed as useless and obsolete by the modernist authors.
- There is a paradox inherent in the modernist stance on religion. Modernism may be viewed as a “religion” itself, in that it creates its own dogmas about humanity. The paradox is that in order for a one to come to an individual perception about God, they must first appeal to the ideologies
and doctrines established by modernism.

Nature of Modernism

2006-06-09T22:46:00.001-07:00

There is a certain uncertainty about the nature of our titular concept modernism. I will have more to say here about this over the weekend -- most of which will be advice to reflect (a.) on the arguments presented in lecture and (b.) the nature of identity exemplified explicitly by Woolf in her Jacob's Room. In the mean time, please read this engagement with the problem by a Marxist: especially the key passage quoted here.

Modernism is a term used to lump together an enormous body of artistic work in all forms--poetry, cinema, painting, architecture--that was produced roughly between the 1890s and the mid 20th century. General definitions are difficult, but modernist work tends to be formally experimental and highly self conscious--think of the Cubist paintings of Picasso or the 'flow of consciousness' of James Joyce's novels. Gareth Jenkins is right to emphasise dislocation and fragmentation as characteristics of modernism. The 'high period' of modernism from 1900-1930 was of course a time of unmatched upheaval, in which the promises of the bourgeois revolution were finally shattered by war, slump and workers' revolt. The accelerating development of technology and the penetration of mass production techniques into every sphere of life added to a deep sense of uncertainty. In Perry Anderson's words, 'European modernism in the first years of this century thus flowered in the space between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present and a still unpredictable political future'.
It has been very tempting for Marxist criticism to glorify modernism given its origin in such a period of upheaval, and its--at least formal--rejection of the past. After the Russian Revolution the intellectuals of Proletkult argued for a rejection of all previous culture, claiming that modernist techniques were the basis for a brave new working class art. Such a simple minded response misses the contradictory nature of all modernism. Gareth is right to point out that modernist work often appears as a retreat from society. Its emphasis on dislocation and alienation could open the way to a kind of rampant subjectivity. His criticism of Virginia Woolf, for example, is telling: 'one cannot escape the feeling, beneath the richness of language, of artistic impoverishment which follows from impoverished grasp of social reality'.

West-ern remembrance of human attitudes

2006-06-07T00:29:00.000-07:00

"So it was not until now, when it happened to my friends, when it was my dear Chris and my dear Margaret who sat thus englobed in peace as in a crystal sphere, that I knew it was the most significant as it was the loveliest attitude in the world. It means that the woman has gathered the soul of the man into her soul and is keeping it warm in love and peace so that his body can rest quiet for a time. That is a great thing for a woman to do. I know there are things at least as great for those women whose independant spirits can ride fearlessly and with interest outside the home park of their personal relationships, but independance is not the occupation of most of us. What we desire is greatness such as this which had given sleep to the beloved."
(Rebecca West, Return of the Soldier, p.70)

L'Écriture Féminine

2006-06-05T18:35:00.000-07:00

A student sends me this from her current research into L'Écriture féminine. "Ann Rosalind Jones (professor at Smith College) writes:

Symbolic discourse (language, in various contexts) is another means through which man objectifies the world, reduces it to his terms, speaks in place of everything and everyone else--including women." Jones explains that women historically, reduced to mere sexual objects by the dominant male voice, "....have been prevented from expressing their sexuality in itself or for themselves." Finding a female form of expression would succeed in revealing the phallocentricity Western language. As I understand it, feminine expression appears de-centralized. Women experience the world sensually with their entire bodies whereas men tend to transmit and receive from their 'antenae' located just below the belt. Male language = logical, linear, even. Female language = contradictory, ambiguous, inconclusive. Theorist Luce Irigaray contends "'She' is infinitely other in herself. That is undoubtedly the reason she is called temperamental, incomprehensible, perturbed, capricious-not to mention her language in which 'she' goes off in all directions and in which 'he' is unable to discern the coherence of any meaning."

Reading Order - Reminder

2006-06-03T13:13:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder that we are reading the West text now -- lecture Thursday coming -- & the Madox Ford masterpiece to following. The syllabus & the outline are updated. (Thanks to classfellow J.B. for the tip.)

Modernism by Comparison

2006-05-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

One way of grasping the peculiar nature of literary modernism is by the method of classical dialectic: in short, by comparison with a alternative which is appreciable similar but effectovely different formally & substantially. A post on the topic in relation to Japanese modes of structure, set in terms of theorist John Hinds' systems of reader- versus writer-responsible texts, is here.

Update: the Hinds article will be available on Reserve Tuesday.

Tuesday upcoming

2006-05-29T09:00:00.000-07:00

We'll finish with Jacob's Room and start on The General; probably no poetry covered in class this week. The design is for you all to feel strong on the types of literary technique that Woolf uses to fulfil her stated purpose of writing a new "modern" form of fiction. Accordingly, I will draw attention to a small number of additional types of experiment in her text which we havn't yet addressed.

The hope is that you will all recognise the diverse & complex mix of form that Woolf -- and what is now called "High Modernism" -- deliberately encode. The challenge -- and, depending upon the facility and bent of the reader, the delight -- High Modernist texts represent is just this process of de-coding and un-puzzling. It is just this that, in my view, made de-construction a necessary development in (certainly critical responses to) literary modernism.

Feel also somewhat comfortable with the terms "formalism", "structuralism" & "futurism" (for the first two, so that the "de-" now commonly prefixed to them can be better understood.)

Men's & Women's Fiction

2006-05-29T08:55:00.000-07:00

One the topic of different reading preferences for men & for women -- à propos differences between Woolf's & Forester's modernist modes -- a blog post on the topic in a Canadian context with active links, & specific reference to inclinations for dialogue versus action, is here.

Celebrate Queen Victoria on her holiday

2006-05-22T00:34:00.000-07:00

Hoping you're enjoying your holiday in honour of Queen Victoria!
I came across this oblique & tendentious article in the Telegraph on the predominance of women at the political head of England following on from Victoria's eminent sixty-four year regnancy:

Have you noticed that modern Britain is the most matriarchal society in the history of the world? The four most famous figures in the public service since the war have been women - the Queen Mother, the Queen, Diana, Princess of Wales and Margaret Thatcher.

Women & WWI Recruitment

2006-05-21T12:37:00.000-07:00

A propos Virginia Woolf's modernist literary experiment in the representation of the experiences between mothers and sons, Jacob's Room, here is the link to the on-line library of First World War recruitment posters as raised in seminar discussion of Sasson's poem "Glory of Women."

Information on the "White Feather" campaign can be found on-line here at the useful "Spartacus" website.

The 1939 Ralph Richardson film version of A. E. W. Mason's The Four Feathers - also raised in seminar discussion - is detailed here. [IMDb treats the 2002 version.]

Class Presentations: "Modernism Is ....."

2006-05-21T11:08:00.000-07:00

Our Individual Presentation assignment gives us the opportunity to better understand the whelming riot of disparate (if not opposing) ideas, individuals and influences that comprise the Modernisms - Literary, Intellectual, and Theological.

Each presentation will fill in the blank to the statement:

"Modernism is ...... [blank.]"

The "blank" will reflect each presenter's individual interests and academic background, as well as library research, general investigation, and, if so wished, discussion with the course instructor on the perhaps uniquely indistinct topic of Modernism. Arrange each presentation into five key points that summarise & explain the "Blank."

If one thesis of our course is correct, I will not be surprising if some "Blanks" contradict others and if more than a few seem to be unconnected and in a history apart.

After the Presentation, e-mail the "Modernism is ...." statement and the five points to the course instructor, where they can posted on the blog for wider reference.

Here is the Presentation schedule by scholar's initial.

May 23rd: E.H. May 25th: C.C. May 30th: K.H.
June 1st: K.V.L. June 6th: C.M. June 8th: J.S.
June 13th: J.C. June 15th: O.G. June 20th: G.W.
June 22th: J.L. June 27th: M.M. June 29th: C.C.
July 4th: R.M. & S.F. July 6th: J.W. July 11th: J.R.
July 13th: A.B. July 18th: J.B. July 20th: R.L.
July 25th: M.L. July 27th: J.R. August 1st: T.P.
August 3rd: J.S.

State & Citizen: Then versus Now

2006-05-12T22:08:00.000-07:00

Opening lecture detailed the far remove at which the State was held from the individual in Britain before the Great War. You can find the same thesis argued in this history. One of the radical consequences of the First World War, and of the Modernist movement, was, as stated, the involvement of the State in individual lives to an increasing extent.

Immediate evidence for the degree to which the State's responsibility is presently conceived can be found in this article from today's Vancouver Province.

Its author, one Joey Thompson, reacts to the dragging death in Maple Ridge of gas station attendant Grant De Patie ..... by blaming the government for not having a law: in effect conceiving of the State as capable of preventing all human tragedy if it would just pass enough laws or apply sufficent taxation.

Whether this fundamental faith in the omnipotency of government is laudable or damnable is outside the purview of our course. What concerns us is how utterly alien Ms. Thompson's mentality would have been to people in Britain before World War One.

To them, it would be be as if Ms. Thompson read of the serial decisions made by the teenaged Darnell Pratt to (i.) drink to excess, (ii.) steal a car, (iii.) drive impaired, (iv.) drive without licence, (v.) steal petrol, (vi.) deliberately run an attendant over, and (vii.) remain indifferent to the screams while he slowly grinded the innocent man's face, limbs, and chest to the bone under the car over a five-mile drive toward an unimaginably agonising death .... and then after she had considered the matter, Ms. Thompson were to decide that the blame belongs to the athletic & administrative incompetancy of the Vancouver Canucks.

Update: via the indispensable Arts & Letters Daily, a timely and somewhat biting article from Britain's Telegraph developing this topic, with the lede:

Despite being richer, people are not happier than in earlier times. Only government can solve the problem, with a more caring attitude. And more therapists... more>>>>

WWI Trench: View "Over the Top"

2006-05-10T01:12:00.000-07:00

Click image for larger view.

Literary Modernism

2006-05-09T14:39:00.000-07:00

[Brought to Top]
This definition of (literary) Modernism, found here, sums up our approach to the complex & multiform set of ideas and designs:

"a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century.... Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader: conventions of realism ... or traditional meter. Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of chronological development was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways of tracing the flow of characters' thoughts in their stream-of-consciousness styles. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions..... Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Its favoured techniques of juxtaposition and multiple point of view challenge the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms." (My emphases.)

(Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], s.v.)

English 338 Course Outline

2006-05-09T14:35:00.000-07:00

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)

Course Syllabus: Summer 2006, English 338

2006-05-01T17:28:00.000-07:00

Course Syllabus & Information

Novels should be read for at least the first time on the following schedule. The Poetry will be read passim and schedule announced in class: one week is dedicated for a concentrated study of the singular phenomenon of the War poets.

Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room
May 9th & 11th
May 16th & 18th
C.S. Forester - The General
May 23rd & 25th
May 30th & June 1st
Rebecca West - The Return of the Soldier
June 6th & June 8th
June 13th & June 15th
Ford Maddox Ford - Parade's End
June 20th & June 22th
June 27th & June 29th
July 4th & July 6th
Evelyn Waugh - Vile Bodies
July 11th & July 13th
July 18th & July 20th
Penguin Edition of First World War Poetry
July 25th & July 27th
Review and Wrap-Up
August 1st & August 3rd

See support material available on Library Reserve.

Assignment Deadlines: Nb. There is a 3% per day late penalty for assignments, documented medical or bereavement leave excepted. For medical exemptions, simply provide a letter from a physician on letterhead which declares his or her medical judgement that an illness prevented work on the essay over the assigned three week period.

1. Mid term paper, twenty-five hundred words: due July 11th in seminar. Assignment sheet with suggested topics will be blogged on June 13th. Criteria will include literary analysis, engagement with course themes and writing mechanics.
2. Group quiz project: in last two seminar weeks.
3. Individual class presentation: schedule and assignment sheet handed out in seminar. A ten minute presentation on one of a choice of topics to be blogged. Ten minutes is a firm limit: the Instructor will blow the whistle ....
4. Final Paper, Thirty-five hundred words: Open topic, due no later than August 7th at midnight in the Instructor's Department mailbox.

Course Approach

Course requirement weighting:
10% Course participation
10% Seminar presentation
20% Group quiz project
20% Mid-term paper (approx. 2500 words)
40% Final Paper (approx. 3500 words)

Nb: “Participation requires both participation in seminar and attendance and punctuality at lecture and seminar."

Instructor Contact:

Office Hours: Tuesday and Thursday, 10:30– 11:20, Tuesday 13:30-15:00, Friday 12:00-13:00, and by appointment, in AQ6094.
Also ogden@sfu.ca and http://firstworldwarlit.blogspot.com. E-mail accepted from campus mail accounts only.

Now, Blog from MS Word!

2005-12-04T14:57:00.000-08:00

OK, this is officially awesome. Blogger now has a free add-on downloadable at this link that integrates blogger.com into Microsoft Office Word.

Student Query on "Jacob's Room"

2005-12-04T14:47:00.000-08:00

I thought that this exchange with a classfellow regarding Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room may be of wider benefit.

I am using Jacob's Room as the second novel in my paper and I came to the part in the novel about the Scilly Isles and how they "shake the very foundations of scepticism and lead to jokes about God" (42). I remember you had said something in lecture that provided a lot of insight into this passage and I can't remember exactly what it was, perhaps you could remind me?

Well, on the principles of the Freudianity which underlies "Jacob's Room," laughter is in part how human beings react to uncomfortable encroachment or threats or perceived danger to deeply-seated beliefs & values. In the jargon of Freud, this is covered under the concept of tabou. Thus, where the rises of the Scilly Isles invoke the sense of the noumenal which similar British phenomena are recorded to have done through so much of the nation's literature and folk tales, forms of disbelief (such as scepticism) among vestigal Victorian and Edwardian casts of mind are challenged. One result of this, then, is internal discomfort, impinging on the individual's idea of God -- still strong by virtue of its historical foundation in the national character -- and producing uncomfortable jokes as a (Freudian) means of dealing with the inner dis-ease.

Last Class: Trench Grub

2005-12-03T00:09:00.000-08:00

Who but sodden, rat-run, frozen bombarded soldiers drowning in mud, awaiting orders to go over the top by generals who had chosen ".... to fight machine gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men" -- who else could actually enjoy eating steak & kidney pie, tripe, tongue, black pudding, and mushy peas?
Well, we won't do that, but remember that if you bring a fiver to class Monday we can at least salute the trench dead with a shared lunch of fish & chips - or just chips - & who knows what all, and a bottle of Bass ....

Update: And the historical toast offered was ....
Our Valiant Dead, & God Save the Queen!

Bibliography: WWI Conscientious Objectors

2005-11-28T23:30:00.000-08:00

Here is Kirsty's helpful presentation bibliography on conscientious objectors.
Anyone who has material from their class presentation that they would be willing to have blogged, please email it along.

Works Cited and Referenced
Conscientious Objection: <http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/infodocs/cos/st_co_wwone1.html#unwilling>.
Conscientious Objectors: <http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/conscientious_objectors.htm>.
Cruttwell, C.R.M.F. A History of the Great War 1914-1918. 2nd Ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964. p.238.
Edmonds, Brigadier-General Sir James E. compiled. A Short History of World War One. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. p.24.
First World War.com – Encyclopedia – U.K. Military Service Act: http://www.firstworldwar.com/atoz/ukconscription.htm>.
First World War.com – Encyclopedia – Conscientious Objectors: http://www.firstworldwar.com/atoz/conscientiousobjectors.htm>.
Hart, B.H. Liddell. History of the First World War. London: Cassell and Co. Ltd., 1970. p.269.
Hayes, Carlton J.H. A Brief History of the Great War. New York: The MacMillain Co., 1929. pp.147, 310.

Google.com and Scholarly Research - Caution

2005-11-27T16:08:00.000-08:00

Further emphasis for my stricture that internet search engines, including Google.com, should only be used as part of academic research only when you already possess expertise on the subject area in question is provided by a google search on Diana Mosley. The first result in the search is an link to an hagiographic article on oswaldmosley.com -- which only an educated few will know to be the website of a Fascist front.

Update: Re. Wikipedia, see this NYT article on "Rewriting History: Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar."

Oswald Mosley & "The Futurist Manifesto."

2005-11-27T15:57:00.000-08:00

The cranks who continue Mosley's fringe cult have (of course) a website, and appropriately it contains F.T. Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto -- one of the targets of Evelyn Waugh's satire in the text of Vile Bodies.

This supports the caution given repeatedly now in lecture that particular care is needed when making moral attributions of British individuals and their social and political systems, due to the uneven and deceptive way that the views of Edwardian individuals and the social systems that they manifest map onto our own political categories and assumptions. We have seen this, of course, in examples such as opposition to Free Trade coming from the Tory position exemplified by Madox Ford's character Christopher Tietjens in Parade's End

Diana Mitford-Guiness-Mosley

2005-11-27T14:58:00.000-08:00

Careful step is needed through biographical sewage, and the prophylactic scholarship only just keeps back the diseased vapour.

From a succinct and comprehensive article in the online Telegraph at the death of the odious Hitlerite Diana Mosley:

One of the funny, charming, intelligent and glamorous Mitford sisters; a denizen of the "Hons' cupboard''; a dedicatee of Vile Bodies; a beautiful woman whom Churchill called "Dinamite''; an inspired interior decorator; a steadfast friend to a wide galère (including some Jews); a fine autobiographer and loving mother; yet Diana Mosley was also a woman who could - when she was inadvisedly invited to appear on Desert Island Discs - describe Adolf Hitler in almost wholly positive terms.

When Evelyn Waugh dedicated Vile Bodies to Bryan and Diana Guinness, the future Lady Mosely was still married to the likeable Guinness heir -- later a novelist, playwrite and poet -- and one of society's belles. This was a decade before she would abandon the future 2nd Baron Moyne and, in Joseph Goebbels' front room with Adolf Hitler the Best Man, marry Sir Oswald Mosley; founder and head of the British Union of Fascists; ordinary hero and wounded veteran of the Trenches; buffoon; sycophant; imitator; rank traitor who would have been shot had he not been English and thus forced to suffer, for him, fate worse than death -- his countrymen's derisory farce, ridicule, mockery and lampoon (indeed, imortalised in ignomy by the Master, P.G. Wodehouse.)

Poetry this Week

2005-11-27T01:52:00.000-08:00

I addition to Vile Bodies this week, we be reading through some female poets in our Penguin First World War anthology: Alice Meynell, May Wedderburn Cannan, Charlotte Mew, Margaret Postgate Cole & Mina Loy.

Next week (our final class) will consider Herbert Read's astonishing "The End of a War" along with several of the translated German War poets from Georg Heym on p.238 to Yval Goll to p.255

Group Blogs

2005-11-24T14:32:00.000-08:00

We'll use this post as a place to broadcast our class' group blog URLs. Now that everyone is confident about what they are doing, no-one will mind others scoping their blog.

When you do visit another group's blog, why not leave them a comment to say you've been, and any compliments and suggestions that you may have. That would be blogosphere synergy: an aggregate of individuals improving the quality of the larger system.

Evelyn Waugh on the BBC

2005-11-20T15:45:00.000-08:00

The BBC has a selections from an excellent 1960 radio interview with Evelyn Waugh, online here.

Of Mrs. Melrose Ape

2005-11-20T15:27:00.000-08:00

For a winningly burlesque website on all things Aimee Semple McPherson, the original of Evelyn [pronounced Eve-elyn] Waugh's parodic creation Mrs. Melrose Ape, click here. The original, by the bye, was Canadian-born ....

Group Project Workshop

2005-11-18T23:56:00.000-08:00

In our third hour this coming Monday we will move to the Assignment Lab in the W.A.C. Bennett Library, room 2105, for a workshop on your Group Project and on related library research methods. I will be available to answer questions, give advice on blogging, and examine and critique your progress to date.

Here is a link or three to some blogging of mine on How to Blog Effectively.

Final Essay

2005-11-16T14:47:00.000-08:00

I will blog three specific topics for the term Paper tomorrow once I finalise them. The essay is to be thirty-five hundred words long, the topics are all related to lecture and seminar discussion on the course texts, and I will extend the due date by four days to Friday December 9th at midnight in my Department mailbox. That way I feel sanguine about applying the late penalty of three percent per day with full rigour: for example, a paper handed in on Monday will lose nine percent of the paper grade - effectively, a letter grade.

Topics:

Sorrows of Satan and The General can be said to account for Britain's conduct, if not very participation, in World War One as being consequent upon certain prevalent social facts. Incorporating one of the poems studied in class into your analysis, explain with express reference to lecture and seminar discussion how Marie Corelli and C.S. Forester transmuted this idea into literature.
Parade's End and Jacob's Room are historically significant works in the construction of literary Modernism. Both books incorporate new and varied techniques of fiction in an attempt to speak the unspeakable -- the effects of World War One on its survivors. Using one or more of the poems discussed in class as counter-text, elaborate upon your specific contributions to seminar discussions either for or against the success and aesthetic appeal of the Modernist project that Virginia Woolf and Ford Madox Ford set for themselves.
Pat Barker makes the point in her Regeneration trilogy that the First World War can be understood as a traditionally British masculine affair gone cruelly wrong, as the rush to manly adventure became in the trenches four wasting years of, in her words, "feminine passivity." Using the particular facts of biography presented in lecture, discuss how the lives and personalities of Marie Corelli and Virginia Woolf influenced their distinctly female fictions in relation to the Great War.
Shell shock has been a recurrring theme in our course engagement with the fiction of World War One. Limiting your argument to ideas raised in class, explain how Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies engages shell shock, with one other course novel and any of the course poetry used as counter-point in your literary analysis.

Mid-Term Papers

2005-11-14T14:09:00.000-08:00

Now that you have your mid-term essays graded and returned, let me encourage you to spend a couple of days going over the comments, reflecting on them, reavaluating your work in light of the specific corrections and analysis, and coming to a decision about your estimation of the grade. If you should determine that he grade does not accurately take into account all aspects of your scholarly essay, or if you wish to have the written comments deciphered, then stop by an Office Hour with your essay for discussion.

Remembrance in Britain: the BBC

2005-11-11T00:50:00.000-08:00

The BBC's "Remembrance" webpage is here.

On the two minutes silence:

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 the guns of Europe fell silent. After four years of the most bitter and devastating fighting, The Great War was finally over. The Armistice was signed at 5am in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiegne, France on November 11, 1918. Six hours later, at 11am, the war ended ....

All locomotion should cease, so that, in perfect stillness, the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the glorious dead.

Uses of Blogs in Academia

2005-11-08T14:08:00.000-08:00

An excellent & concise blog entry from EdTechPost detailing "some uses of blogs in education" here. I recommend it highly as an excellent introduction to the ways in which blogging will, to a virtual certainty, become integrated into university practice to the same degree as e-mail, on-line registration, and digitised databases are now.
Click the diagramme below for a full-size version of the author's matrix of some of the possible uses of blogs in education.

Britain's Poppy Day

2005-11-07T14:58:00.000-08:00

To follow-up the query raised in seminar: the British equivalent of Remembrance Day is Poppy Day - so my memory held up well there. It is not a "Statutory Holiday" (i.e. Bank Holidays in Britain,) but rather it is honoured the nearest Sunday with a Church memorial service. This is equivalent to Harvest Festival, which Canadians celebrate as "Thanksgiving Day;" adding a "statutory holiday" that uses the British time of year but the American name.
More cases, by the bye, of Canada creeping steadily away from Britain and toward the United States ....
Nb: in recent years, Britain has introduced a two minutes silence on November 11th, when all offices, government, factories, schools, &c, are encouraged to volutarily observe two minutes silence at 11:00 am in memoriam.

More on War Propaganda

2005-11-07T14:50:00.000-08:00

[Ms. McKinnon was good enough to take the trouble to honour my request for elaboration of her piquant polemical parentheses to her academic presentation on British propaganda in support of World War One. She blogs delightfully, thus.]

"This is just a quick blog to cover some of my more personal objections to the use of propaganda during WWI which were not included in the body of my presentation on the 31st of october.
My first frustration with the propaganda machine of the British is that it used some of the most gifted minds of writers and artists to manipulate the British people, particularly young men. Authors such as Bennett, Conan Doyle, and Kipling were sent over to view "real" trench-warfare and lie to their public and I find that disgusting.
My presentation divided propaganda into several categories of my own devising, with which I will list my objections:

Peer Pressure: This involved the classic attempt to make any man feel like "less than nothing" by insinuating that he is the only man not man enough to go to war. It invoves degrading men infront of their peers and family and forcing them to support the effort as that is supposedly synonymous with helping friends and family.
Backward Notion of Warfare: Many of the propaganda posters of the era said things like "Forward to Victory!" while using antiquated notions of warfare to depict life in the trenches. Men on horses, and knights slaying dragons, were meant to be accurate representations of what war in the trenches would be like. This kind of thinking was what drove generals to murder millions of their own men in mass slaughter while pushing for a "break through". It is what destroyed the youth of multiple nations. It is one of the most
terrifying instances if misrepresentation in propaganda as the thinking behind it killed millions of innocents.
Appeal to British Sympathies and Shame: This category includes visions of 'brave little Belgium' and the "What did you do in the Great War Daddy?" poster. Charity is one of the major Christian values used in Britain, even today, to manipulate the masses. It was used to pull Britain into the war to protect other, weaker nations - with this, I have little problem. Shaming a man into going to war by implying that his children may be ashamed of him later if he does not is a reprehensible act. The sense of pride in a good British workman would not stand up to such attacks, nor would his body to the rapidly fired enemy bullets. What a shameful use of tactics!
Demonisation of the Germans: These posters only really bother me because I feel that their influence can still be felt today. In war, it is necessary to demonise the enemy, but in the form of propaganda it is also dangerous as the images are not as easily erased from the human mind as they are torn off walls.

The point is - propaganda did more than help the nation, it bled the nation until there was naught left to bleed. It falsified, to an astonishing degree, the realities of life at the front, and extended the chasm between home and the front itself. Soldiers were coming home to a different world and many found themselves unable to fit in where they had left, and unable to reconcile what they had seen with civilian visions of the war. Shame threatened by pro-war posters mutated into the guilt of war, the guilt of surving...I wonder how many would have held off volunteering, how many more would have lived, how much more life would have been valued...if not for the betrayal of the propaganda office.... "

War Poetry Study

2005-11-07T14:28:00.000-08:00

Update: seeing several classfellows today without their Poetry anthology, I've moved this post up. By way of pre-emptive exculpation, I repeated the substance of this post both at the start and at the end of lecture & seminar on October 31st. No smugness intended .......

Update 2: An excellent website "Poetry of the First World War" here.

Because we lose a week of the term due to the Thanksgiving holiday, we will be working through selections of the Great War poetry from our Penguin anthology gradually during the remaining weeks of the term.
If you have any favourites from your own reading, please let me know by e-mail & we can enjoy and study them as a class.

"Causes" of the First World War

2005-11-03T00:03:00.000-08:00

As argued in lecture, there was no cause to the First World War. The popular factoid that the death of a minor (though pleasant and competant) European royal in a dour Balkan capital caused the West to immolate itself in four years of a Dantean Inferno in French ditches is not false but merely silly on its face.
Talking to a classfellow in an Office Hour this week, it came to me that attributing a cause to the War is not an empirical or academical problem, but a historical-conceptual failure to use the term "cause" properly.
Before the putative Enlightenment, it was understood that there are four causes, delineated by Aristotle in his Physics, that together explain an event.

Material cause: the physical properties involved.
Formal cause: the aggregate of underlying properties which amount to its unique identity.
Efficient cause: the initial motion or action which began the event.
Final cause: the event's function or purpose -- its end.)

Take a simple illustrative example. I am about to pot the black in a game of snooker. Thwack! It's in; I win yet again. Material cause is the solid constrution of the table, balls, &c.: if the cue ball were tissue and the black jello, the event (the potting of the black) would not take place. Formal cause is the rules of billiards, the shape of the table, cue, rack, and all the other contributing elements that shape and frame -- i.e. that form -- the event. Efficient cause, of course, is the mechanics behind the cue hitting the cue ball. And final cause is Stephen Ogden winning the match and having his universal supremacy at billiards re-affirmed for posterity . Or something like that.

Applying, then, the robust pre-Enlightenment concept of causation to the problem of how and why the First World War began we see at once its great explanatory power as well as the relative feebleness of the Englightenment's shrunken understanding of "cause". The killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by an inept Bosnian terrorist is efficient cause of the First World War: and a good efficient cause it is. But being stuck in Englightenment-Cause thinking has trapped the generations of post-War scholars in an impossible search for more, or for bigger, or for better efficient causes: impossible, because no efficient cause and no amount or quality of efficient causes can ever fully explain an event. Now, of course, if the event should happen to be small enough, and if the mind contemplating the case be sufficiently bereft of imagination (or, it might be said, of rigour), then an efficient cause can seem adequate. But events on a large or more significant scale reveal the impotence of the Enlightenment-Cause model.

Material cause of the War includes 1914 Europe's demographics, military technology & ordnance, national-geographical, and perhaps the crossover network of treaties in effect. Its formal cause can be summed up as the ethnic, cultural and political histories of the nations and Empires involved. And final cause is ..... well, final cause is for each historian, historiographer and theologian to decide and to argue individually.

Ford Madox Ford in Parade's End puts one conviction of WWI's final cause -- the Tories' -- into the mouth of the protagonist Christopher Tietjens; and that would be the altruism of England. Tietjens is Ford's literary manifestation of Tory England, so when it is said of him that "....it is, in fact, asking for trouble if you are more altruist than the society that surrounds you," [Penguin, 207] it is actually England that has asked for trouble (and will, in fact, be smashed -- insofar as its Tory character is concerned) by entering the War altruistically to defend the "surrounding" societies of the Belgians and the French primarily for the sake of (to Madox Ford, cricket-inspired) Duty.

[Tietjens'] mind was at rest because there was going to be a war. From the first moment of his reading the paragraph about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand he had known that, calmly and with assurance. Had he imagined that this country would come in he would not have known a mind at rest. He loved this country for the run of the hills, the shape of its elm trees and the way the heather, running uphill to the skyline, meets the blue of the heavens. War for this country could only mean humiliation, spreading under the sunlight, an almost invisible pall over the elms, the hills, the heather, like the vapour that spread from .... oh, Middlesbrough! .... But of war for us [i.e. Britain] he had no fear. He saw our Ministry sitting tight till the opportune moment, and then grabbing a French channel port or a few German colonies as the price of neutrality.

You each will, I trust, be able to advance your own final cause of the War with our course under your belt ....

And to conclude, there was indeed no "cause" for the First World War: but there were, as for everything, four causes.

Update: Click this link for a typical school history attempting to explain the First World War in terms limited to efficient causes. It is actually a fairly sophisticated attempt of its type, differentiating as it does between "long term" and "short term" [efficient] causes.

"Parade's End" End

2005-10-31T14:55:00.000-08:00

That is, our focused study of Parade's End is at an end. For me, Madox Ford's master-work is the centre of our course: a major literary work which gives gravity to a select cluster of consequential satellite novels and first-class poetry. Not only a tetralogy but a foundational text in the development of literary modernism, Parade's End is daunting enough in its mere form. Moreover, its setting in the span, across the Great War, from the Edwardian to the Georgian eras; and its representation of a social ideal - English Toryism -- as dead entirely to us as the Myan priesthood, adds blank unfamiliarity to the challenges that the book seemingly presents to today's reader.

Yet, that being said, in my estimation, Ford has done what only literary genius proper can do: craft his art into a delightfully, trippingly, captivatingly readable narrative. Now, admittedly I have loved Edwardian fiction from youth, brought a passionate conviction that the absolute horror of First World War shaped our own world down to the smallest cultural effect (not the so-called butterfly effect but the rogue moon, Deep Impact asteroid-collision effect;) and allow, even encourage, the distortions caused by my Yorkshire diaspora to influence my reading. But still, Parade's End is simple & varied, fast-paced, engagingly clever, suspenseful and arousing, and a real tale of a love triangle between three alluring chracters.

In a phrase, it is not Ulysses -- though Madox Ford was instrumental in the successful creation, advocacy and defence of Joyce's cause celebre. Now we have completed our three-week study of Parade's End, we have, I believe, a very strong sense of the Great War in its historical context; of the political and social nexus that created and prolonged trench warfare; of the timbre of the men -- mass millions yet discretely individual -- who, if they did not die or lie smashed, fought for four years amid rats, gas and shell-shock, up to their necks in mud; of the character of an Age, dead and discredited, but with much, if seen advisedly and from a charitable prospect, to commend it and to admire.

The lectures on Parade's End sought to make the larger work accessible by concentrating on its binding themes: the history, characteristics and fate of English Toryism; the literary devices, techniques and methods of Madox Ford's vanguard modernism; the operation of Freudianism in the text; and the manifold binaries represented by Tietjens and Sylvia -- repression & impulse; Sadism in its clinical sense & continence on principle; Roman Catholicism & Anglicanism; promiscuity & monogamy; Whigism & traditionalism; id & super-ego, etc. etc.

Please be encouraged to add your comments (either signed or anonymous) to this post on your assessment of our engagement with Parade's End.

"I Hate England"

2005-10-31T14:35:00.000-08:00

A propos the general judgement among our class that Toryism, manifest in the type-character Christopher Tietjens, is a product of neurotic repression, the recent article from Arts & Letters Daily, entitled "I Hate England," which I read out in class today delineates the enduring, and to the author defining, characteristic among the English of suppressing their horrible nature:

Anger has made the English an ugly race. But then this anger is also the source of England’s most admirable achievement — their heroic self-control. It’s the daily struggle of not giving in to their natural inclination to run amok with a cricket bat, to spit and bite in a crowded tearoom, that I admire most in the English. It’s not what they are, but their ability to suppress what they are, that’s great about the English.

The article goes on, very helpfully, to relate this to English humour and England's beligerant attitude toward all, repeat all, non-English countries; having its greatest intensity for its closest neighbours (Scots & Irish, certainly; but first and best, the French):

English comedy is war by other means and it still is the actual last war. The rest of Europe looks on with growing exasperation and incomprehension at the English’s ability endlessly to bait the Germans for losing the war and consistently tease the French for losing it as well .... English humour is the sound of the bullies.

And, as if to oblige, this article appears in today's press bringing this point home empirically.

Eighty-six percent of people in Britain aged 18 to 30 think the French deserve "a popular negative stereotype," suggests an opinion poll
conducted for an Anglo-French art show in London .... "British people should face up to the fact that they have an enormous problem when it comes to the French," said exhibition organiser Richard Kaye, a Brition resident in France. "The British will make jokes about the French which would, if made to the detriment of other national or ethnic groups, be considered extremely racist and dangerous."

Update: The above, all perfectly true, notwithstanding, it leaves unmentioned a peculiar paradox. That is, that the English are highly tolerant of non-English within England. Here is a remark from the French manager of a one of London's top football clubs, Arsenal FC:

When I came to England, I was happy to come and be confronted with the English culture, where the owners of the clubs were English and they opened the door to foreign people .... [But now] it looks more like foreign people are buying the clubs and employing English people .... it's a change and it's very important that the values of the game remain as they were before - respected and admired everywhere.

London is far and away the most multi-ethnic city in Europe, yet race violence is quite rare. When it did occur -- Brixton in the early 80s -- everyone seemed to agree that it was not cricket and moved on. Football hooliganism, for instance, is between club supporters at home, and that even mere preparation for real hooliganism -- against European countries during International matches.

Part of this attitude derives from the ethos exemplified by Speakers' Corner: click here for a Canadian article from this past weekend on the current threat posed by New Labour legislation to the British public commons' speech tradition.

Quite delightfully from the perspective of our course, the "UK Religious Hatred Bill" will possibly be defeated by the last place on Earth where Parade's End Toryism may be found -- that is, the House of Lords. And of course Blackadder is campaigning against the Bill ....

Update: Well, when I read this headline today I thought I had blogged too soon on racial toleration in England. However, "Race Row Stuns Kop" ("the kop" is the home supporters end at Anfield - Liverpool FC's ground) refers to a visiting player racially abusing one of the Liverpool's black players.

Fresh Support for our Course Thesis

2005-10-28T00:28:00.000-07:00

The indispensable Arts & Letters Daily has linked two articles that support our course thesis: one from a centre-left journal and one from a centre-right.

From the left, you heard this nearly verbatim in our opening lecture:

It is now conventional wisdom that the First World War and its senseless, unimaginable slaughter was the Ur-catastrophe of the last century. It brutalized a Europe that before 1914, though deeply flawed by injustice and arrogance, also contained the promise of great emancipatory movements, championing the demands for social justice, for equality, for women’s emancipation, for all of human rights. The war radicalized Europe; without it, there would have been no Bolshevism and no Fascism. In the postwar climate and in the defeated and self-deceived Germany, National Socialism flourished and ultimately made it possible for Hitler to establish the most popular, the most murderous, the most seductive and the most repressive regime of the last century.

From the right, an analogy between England before, after and during the First World War with the United States of America today:

At the beginning of the 20th century, the British Empire was an unopposed hyperpower (much as the United States has been since 1989). As historian Colin Cross observes: "In terms of influence it was the only world power" .... But after the conclusion of the first World War, Britain's imperial psyche began to fracture" .... Why did it all crumble? Several interrelated reasons - among them the grisly fact that England had lost virtually an entire generation of future leaders in the trenches of Europe. But another important cause was the waning of confidence on the part of liberal British elites .... In an important sense, the British Empire's strength failed because its elite liberal citizens stopped believing in it.

Most pertinent for us in the article from which this quotation is taken -- most especially in relation to Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End -- is the writer's premis (and our own course's thesis!) that England was irrecoverably ruined by the First World War: the Great War, that is, still directly effects all that is English -- its literature very much included.

New Labour in Action

2005-10-27T00:19:00.001-07:00

As I stated in this week's lecture on the history of Whigs & Tories, pace Ford Madox Ford's "history of the last Tory," Britain is currently governed by the descendants of the Whigs -- now named, under Tony Blair, New Labour.

An excellent illustration of their politically canny -- and electorally successful -- method of applying Whig ideology by using Tory language is their current "Schools White Paper." The Labour party's own description is here: the populist tabloid The Sun describes the proposals this way:

Kids to Pick the Teachers: Pupils as young as 11 will help hire their own teachers under a huge education shake-up unveiled yesterday.

As I say, Christopher Tietjens' (& Henry Ryecroft's) England is divided from Blair's Cool Brittania by a fissure in the Parade of Time ....

As it happens, Arts & Letters Daily today features this article from left wing writer David Sirota which berates the equivalent centre-left party in America (i.e. the Democrats) for, in effect, not cloning Tony Blair. Blair, by the bye, would win virtually by acclamation were he to run for the American presidency.

NYRB Exchange on Parade's End

2005-10-26T00:05:00.000-07:00

Please treat yourself to this (typically catty) exchange between two literary scholars (one American one Canadian) on competing interpretations of Parade's End.

N.b. I'll see if I can get online access to the original article that sparked the exchange through our Library.

Less Wiki More Encyclo

2005-10-25T14:59:00.000-07:00

(Even more) problems with wiki-(grimace)-pedia detailed here. The Encyclopedia Brittanica was good enough for our Christopher Tietjens .... and Sherlock Holmes.

Group Project Update

2005-10-25T14:57:00.000-07:00

You should have your group blog well up and running at this point in the term.

All group members should have two or three preliminary posts each and a growing level of familiarity with blogger.com

Blog posts do not have to be long; nor need they be discursive. As a rough estimate, three posts per week per person is a good average, and only one of these every two weeks need be significantly lengthy - that is, an extended reflection on some aspect of your blog focus. Shorter posts can be done in an idle five, ten or fifteen minute break among regular computer time.

You will be graded on the variety, frequency, even distribution among group members, relevancy, and imagination of your posts. Simply make a note when an idea or connection arises related to your theme and them make a quick blog entry.

In five years or so, students will be blogging frustrations, excitements, and requests for collaborative assistance while writing course assignments ....

Reading Effectively at Remove

2005-10-24T14:58:00.000-07:00

Seminar discussion today brought up the question of how it can be possible when reading fiction to capture the mind-set of a time now past and a culture now dead - since the reader's mind is entirely formed by its own culture, distant in place or time or both.
Specifically, it was asked how it can possible for a contemporary Western reader (possessing what I call triumphant Whig mentality) to read Ford Madox Ford's literary representation of "the last Tory" sympathetically, when Ford was purposely portraying a type cut off from our present by the absolute fissure that was World War One.

Now, this post from my Japanese literature course presents one way of approach, mapped by C.S. Lewis in his Discarded Image.

The concept from Romanticism that escaped me on the spot in seminar, and which I offered as a solution to this problem, is Keats' negative capability (I had Eliot's "objective correlative" in mind -- pertinent to Parade's End in another context -- blocking Mr. Keats from my mental foreground!) Here are the pertinent sentences from a letter of Keats':

Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. [My emphases.]

Attendance

2005-10-24T14:54:00.000-07:00

I simple note from the Instructor to say that I have appreciated your excellent attendance along the term. Your presence makes discussion -- especially in seminar -- the more beneficial for all. My thanks especially to those who have explained their absence with a considerate email either in advance or, with illness, after the fact.
Again, my compliments and gratitude to you all.

Edwardian echoes

2005-10-21T00:12:00.000-07:00

If we keep our ears to the ground, we can hear echoes, though faint, of some of the attitudes from Edwardian and Georgian times in contemporary English culture.

Here are two examples.

The perennial and deep-rooted English attitude that all the world's troubles are ultimately the result of French perfidity or decadence is evident in Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton's new book Holy Terror. The left-wing (formerly Manchester) Guardian describes Eagleton as "the High Priest of Lit Crit .... a Catholic-turned-Marxist from a working-class background." Nonetheless, Eagleton's thesis in Holy Terror is that "Terrorism itself may be a new concept – it arose with modernity in the French revolution."

And in general, the English perennially fret about decadence. Theodore Dalrymple merely continues a type. And it's in the water there. Madonna - yes, that Madonna - has now married an Englishman and is evolving herself into a model of English country life propriety: literally, modelling herself on the cover of Ladies Home Journal.
The English press have re-christened her with the very English name "Madge." And in due course she has delivered a screed against .... decadence: "Madonna warns how people 'are going to go to hell, if they don't turn from their wicked behavior;" protests that "most priests are gay;" and, waxing eschatological, declares that "'The Beast' is the modern world that we live in."

And it is like way that the English class system, so strong a concern in our course texts, will persist despite official policy designed to eradicate it.

Mid-Term Essay

2005-10-17T14:24:00.000-07:00

Write a two thousand word essay on one of the following topics. The essay is due in my Department mailbox at midnight on October 31st.

1.] “Tempest, if there is one human being more than any other that I utterly abhor, it is the type of man so common to the present time, the man who huddles his own loathly vices under a cloak of assumed broad-mindedness and virtue. Such a one will even deify the loss of chastity in woman by the name of “purity” – because he knows that it is by her moral and physical ruin alone that he can gratify his brutal lusts. Rather than be such a sanctimonious coward I would openly proclaim myself vile!”
This execration from Satan in persona Rimanez is arguably the quintessential passage of Sorrows of Satan. Analyse the significance of three telescoping levels. One, fully unpack the moralism on its straightforward reading. Two, explain its significance as a Demonic doctrine, according to Correlli’s characterization of the Prince of Darkness in the novel. And three, suggest how Corelli applied the passage as an indictment of the state of Edwardian England leading up to the singularity of the First World War.

2.] C.S. Forester and Ford Madox Ford both have superlative genius as raconteurs. Rare among storytellers, however, both are also writers of high literary quality. Select one passage from The General and explain how what seems to be pure storytelling in addition demonstrates elite literary technique, and one passage from Parade’s End which exemplifies High Modernist esoterica but is at the same time roustabout tale-telling such as would lighten a watch of soldiery under eighteen hours of bombardment in a rat-run trench.

3.] Parade’s End is a tour de force of literary modernism which contains multitudes. It has plausibly been praised by writers of unimpeachable calibre as the finest fictional representation of the First World War. From your reading of the tetralogy select any two passages which support this claim and detail, with entirely open possibilities, the literary means by which Ford accomplishes this. This is an “Open-topic”question.

Blog link

2005-10-13T23:37:00.000-07:00

I received a pleasant email from Esther MacCallum-Stewart at the Break of Day in the Trenches blog, & note a comment from her in our original post. The blogosphere in action.

C.S. Forester

2005-10-11T15:00:00.000-07:00

I'm interested in any comments you may care to post after reading C.S. Forester's The General. Academia's neglect of Forester is peculiar when novelists far inferior in influence, ability, scope, intellect, subtlty and artistry are given place.
Forester's achievement in The General is to combine readability, character portayal, historiography, lament and caution in artistic balance. Having read the novel, one forever feels that an insight into the Great War has been gained, an opinion created, and an interest piqued.
But, over to you .....

Update: the comments so far are of an astonishing calibre. read for your edification, & by all means add your own (even it pre-empts your essay argument!)

Images of a Forgotten War

2005-10-11T14:25:00.000-07:00

The Royal Canadian Legion gives a link to an excellent NFB website dedicated to remembrance of "the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the Great War"-- "Images of a Forgotten War."
Click through to the pop up menu and select from various types of material. Best for me was the now-digitised archive of Film from the Great War.

Literary Approach to WWI

2005-10-07T22:00:00.000-07:00

One of the best literary treatments of the First World War is The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell. Its "Dedication" says much:

To the memory of
Technical Sergeant Edward Keith Hudson, ASN 36548772
Co. F, 419th Infantry
Killed beside me in France
March 15, 1945

Fussell has written a recounting and reflection on the Great War through the mind of a literary scholar. Though unique, this succeeds brilliantly -- the book won the 1976 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award -- by uniting in a seamless whole the facts of history, the research and sensitivity of of a literary scholary and the literary power of the great poets and novelists of the war. A brief account here gives the flavour

A copy is on course Reserve.

Progress to date

2005-10-05T00:24:00.000-07:00

Well, four weeks completed and a break for the Thanksgiving holiday next week seems opportune to reflect on our progress.
As I see it, we have come a long way and have made a very effective use of our time & effort. From a beginning of tabula rasa concerning the First World War years, we now have a good grounding in salient issues of the period preceeding, the specific character of trench warfare, and a sense of engagement with its peculiar horrors and their nearly universal reach in the world that the Great War brought into being - our world.
We will complete our engagement with Forester's The General in the first half of our next class together and begin Madox Ford's Parade's End. Your reading of this substantial work will perhaps be assisted by an awareness that the author has written a self-consciously modernist text - and you will need to calibrate your stance as a reader accordingly.

The Essential First World War WebSite

2005-10-01T01:59:00.000-07:00

I have linked to Break of Day in the Trenches: a work of bright bloggy glory from English academic Esther MacCallum-Stewart at the University of Sussex.
It has as much and more than one needs for a very good understanding of the Great War: I will be linking to specific sections from it, with comment, over the term (crediting the original in each instance.)
I note happily, for instance, that in a press release on her scholarship, Dr. MacCallum-Stewart supports our incorporation of Blackadder Goes Forth as a very valuable and accurate evocation of the First World War soldiery:

Rowan Atkinson's Blackadder offers a more accurate social view of the soldier's experience of Wrld War One than poets such as Wilfred Owen, according to new research.

On Reserve

2005-10-01T01:37:00.000-07:00

Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War is on course reserve: chapter eight, "The Death Instinct: Why Men Fight" is very well worth reading. The title comes from this:

This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might,majesty, dominion, or power, except war. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They maybe to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful.
~Wilfred Owen, from a preface to a planned book of his poetry.

Individual Presentation: Time Limit Relaxed

2005-09-30T23:37:00.000-07:00

In interests of extending one person's request fairly to all, the time limit on the individual presentation assignment is now five minutes minimum and ten minutes maximum.
There will be no effect on grading for your preference of length beyond the five minute minimum.

Edwardian Age

2005-09-30T22:06:00.000-07:00

As I said passingly in the last lecture, the Edwardian era enjoyed a nostalgia moment in the seventies. The word "dude, originally popularised in the Edwardian age (etymology here) attained its present-day popularity in the seventies.
See also In Search of Blandings on course reserve.

Group Project: Assignment Details

2005-09-28T14:51:00.000-07:00

The Group project is designed to be straightforward, enjoyable, and beneficial. Each group will create and maintain a Web Log about one of the course primary texts.

A short tutorial on setting up a blog will be given in the Library on Monday October 3rd. At this time you will be assigned to a Group.

The manner of approach to, and treatment of, your text is entirely for you to decide. This assignment offers you the opportunity to enhance, challenge or re-invent the specific focus of both the lectures and your seminar discussions.

The grading criteria are the scope, originality, inventiveness and literary insight of the accumulated blog entries. Technical proficiency will not be graded, but of course you are free to use any mechanical technique you wish. I will publish all the Groups' blog addesses on the Course blog and you are encouraged to solicit advice & criticism from the whole class throughout the course of the semester. Open collaboration is one great strength of blogging: some scholars, for instance, post parts of articles or even books in the blogosphere for criticism and correction before publication.

Of course, I am available for expert consultation: in person during Office Hours, and online most times.

Because this is a Group project, you will find that synergy will soon animate and enlived the assignment. I offer the suggestion that each Group assign responsibilities to members based on individual proficiencies and preferences. For instance, in principle, only one member need do the mechanics of posting the collaborative entries. There will be one group grade for all members.

I will take a snapshot of your blog on the day of the last seminar of the term and use that for grading: however I will look in regularly throughout the term as a means to, shall we say, encourage you not to leave the whole enterprise until the last minute. The experience of blogging regularly for a couple of months will, I believe, be its own benefit to you down the years.

Stoicism in the British Character

2005-09-28T14:06:00.000-07:00

In the aftermath of the 7/7 Islamicist terror attacks in London, the tenor of the British response was widely praised as Stoical. Blog entries, with expansive links, can he found here, here and here.

This strain within the traditional British character (it is, historically, intertwined with Christianity) is important to understand if one wishes a full understanding of the Edwardians' (in general) and Marie Corelli's (in particular) reaction to the Deacadent movement. One small example is Gilbert & Sullivan's satiric operetta on aestheticism, entitled Patience. You'll be familiar with its immortal lines:

If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line / as
a man of culture rare ... And ev'ryone will say / As you walk your flow'ry way, / "If he's content with a vegetable love which would certainly not suit me, / Why, what a most particularly pure young man / this pure young man must be!"

Individual Presentations

2005-09-26T23:54:00.000-07:00

Your individual presentation assignment is deliver a five-minute presentation based on research into a specific aspect of the period background to the literature we are studying. Your final cause is the improvement of our understanding and the increase in our appreciation of the conditions surrounding the literature of the First World War. After the presentation you will hand in your research notes to the instructor for consideration in the grading of the assignment.

Update: please feel free to use any types of aid, media or format that you prefer. The only criterion in this regard is effectiveness.
Update 2: again, the specific format of your presentation is for you to decide. If I might offer a recommendation, one effective method would be to use the last minute of your presentation to state your opinion on the connection of your chosen topic to the literature of our period.
Update 3: the five minute time limit will be strictly enforced - from both sides. This is a discipline that will prove effective in many future practical applications.
Update 4: another recommendation is that you use the opportunity to develop your oral presentation skills. Design and incorporate techniques which give your presentation its greatest effectiveness. As always, of course, I am available for consultation ...

The choice of topic is entirely up to you: your only criterion in addition to that of relevancy as stated above is that you find it intriguing. Select your topic from any one of three areas:

Pre-War: the Edwardian age.
The War: 1914-1918
The aftermath: 1919-1945

Some illustrative examples of specific topics, all with direct relevancy to the period literature, within these three areas are as follow:

Pre-War: country life; the Decadents; individual Edwardian authors; Winston Churchill in the Boer War; the Aesthetes; French absinthism; the English Music Hall age; Edwardian scandal; Darwinism and the myth of Progress; the "Little Englander" controversy; Jeeves and Bertie Wooster; London in the 1910s; fin de siecle; bluestockings and the New Woman; King Edward VII.

The War: life in the trenches; war poetry; women and the War; casualty rates; masculinity in the Great War; the conscription issue; the Somme; Lawrence of Arabia; War paintings; politics and Prime Ministers; war propaganda and censorship; Gas warfare; the causes of the War; shell-shock; the aristocracy in the war; the Christmas truce; war experiences of specific authors; war invalids; the Red Baron and the Sopwith Camel.

The Aftermath: post-war lives of individual authors; the Versailles treaty; Georgian poets; Adolf Schicklgruber - wounded German army corporal, gas victim and impecunious painter; literary modernism; depression in Britain; the Balfour Declaration - British Empire and the Palestine Question; Winston Churchill, the wilderness years; anti-semitism in Britain; decline of Empire; King George V.

Books also on course reserve.

2005-09-24T02:14:00.000-07:00

I have also put two books on course reserve which give visual images of the First World War: one through photographs of the time, the other in paintings; both exceptional in their evokation of life in the trenches.

Documentary Video now on course reserve

2005-09-24T02:09:00.000-07:00

The Canadian National Film Board documentary on The Battle of Vimy Ridge, part of its series on the First World War, is now on course reserve in VHS format. It is in four tapes, of about twenty minutes each, which can be taken out singly.
The narrator, Paul Gross, has this to say elsewhere about his engagement with the War:

Paul Gross has never been able to forget watching his grandfather die.
"He went completely out of his mind at the end. He started telling me about a hideous event that happened during a skirmish in a little ruined town in World War I. He'd killed someone in a miserable, horrible way and that had obviously haunted him throughout the rest of his life. As my grandfather died, in his mind he was back in that town, trying to find a German boy whom he'd bayonetted in the forehead. He'd lived with that memory all his life - and he was of a time when people kept things to themselves. When he finally told the story, it really affected me and I've
not been able to get it out of my head." Unable to rid himself of the tale, Paul decided to put it down on paper. It is now a screenplay which he hopes to be able to turn into a film.
Now Magazine (UK), 11 June 1998

Victorians: Progress & Degeneration

2005-09-22T14:41:00.000-07:00

A caution was voiced today against the characterisation in lecture of the Victorian Age as a schizophrenic time which, on the one side, trumpeted increases in science and technology while, on the other, crusaded against increases in moral degeneracy. The plausible-sounding objection was that every Age considers itself to be experiencing moral recusuancy, and thus no knowledge is gained hearing about the Victorians' experience of the merely perennial.

The caution is a fair and, in the general case a valuable, one. Example could be multiplied. Even in the New Testament warning is given:

[1] This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. [2] For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, [3] Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, [4] Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; [5] Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away. [II Timothy 3.]

Indeed, the argument I made earlier in the lecture was that History is a process of reaction, with each current denouncing its predecessor - frequently special pleading by label: "The Enlightenment" & "the Dark Ages;" and not to forget "Modernism."

Yet, for all that, among the Victorians was an obsession with they perceived as a crisis of degeneracy unique in its degree and different in its kind. To give a slightly trivial example, the tang of degeneration is part of the piquancy contributing to the enormous popularity of the Sherlock Holmes stories. A much better piece of evidence is ... Marie Corelli! The unmatched popularity of her fiction and its immediate and uniform concern with degeneracy is very strong testimony to the zeitgeist. I own a copy of one of the better scholarly treatments of the matter,
Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880-1940 by William Greenslade, which I will put on course reserve.

Reasons for the obsession with degeneracy among Victorians, one that cut across class, sex and income, are manifold and over-determining. Ordinary fin de siecle consequences are of course important. Additionally, a technological explosion had originally driven the Industrial Revolution which at once created a working class and forced it into urban concentrations. The resulting slums throughout the proliferating major cities -- Manchester, Bradford, Leeds, Birmingham, Newcastle, &c. -- ignored hygiene and bred disease and ignored social welbeing and bred vice: gambling, prostitution, brawling and drunkenness. Victorian England was the high water mark of Methodism and Evangelicism and its crusade for social reformation was uniquely intense. Slavery and child labour were abolished; fourteen-hour factory work days were reduced for women; prisons and hospitals, through campaigners such as Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale, were made more humane. The Salvation Army campaigned to counter alcoholism and other vices. And the ever-intensifying technology of the Industrail revolution was turned, by reformers, to improve drainage, sewage and potable water systems.

To this social atmosphere I would add an element that I have not yet fully defined nor mapped the origins of (beyond its evolutionary connection to Puritanism), but which amounts to an aesthetic, emotional and an erotic preference for hid delights. It can be contrasted with an Age -- such as ours perhaps -- which prefers things revealed and decries restraint. The Victorians were titillated, and comforted, by what was known to exist but was draped from universal sight.

Add to this the intellectual earthquake which was Darwinism: a theory taken as a justification for progress and improvement -- the progress and improvement, that is, which is so much the character of Victorianism. The intellectual climate, then, produced a cast of mind which can be termed, not merely progressivist, but outright perfectibilian.

These, and indeed other, aspects of the Victorian Age, then, made it intensely (I don't say uniquely) expressive when developments which are comprehensibly termed "degeneracy" became evident. And thus it has become a commonplace among scholars of the Nineteenth Century to take obsession with degeneracy as a salient characteristic of the times.

Room Non-Change

2005-09-19T14:57:00.000-07:00

The consensus today on our classroom assignment was that we keep our current rooms, but use what can be called the empty hour between our two two-hour blocks for study and thus finish our class at 13:30. This additionally allows us to take a ten minute break after our first fifty minutes. In addition to group study times, the third hour can also be used for watching pertinent video material and snacking -- I'll check on rooms availability for this.

War Quotation found

2005-09-19T14:51:00.000-07:00

In sheepish self-rebuke for my failure to assume, in absence of knowing, that Dr. Johnson was the author of the quotation which came to me during your seminar work on the poetry of Graves, Sassoon and Owen, I now quote the full passage in its context from Boswell's unassailably majestic Life of Samuel Johnson:

Johnson suddenly began to speak of subordination, then of fame, of wealth, and finally of war. Johnson observed provocatively, "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been [a sailor with hard service] at sea." Boswell pointed out that "Lord Mansfield did not." But Johnson denied it by saying that if Lord Mansfield were present when Generals and Admirals were talking together, "he would shrink; he'd wish to creep under the table." Boswell denied this also.
Finally, in exasperation, Johnson replied to Boswell, "No, Sir; were Socrates and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden both present in any company, and Socrates to say, 'Follow me, and hear a lecture on philosophy;' and Charles, laying his hand on his sword, to say, 'Follow me, and dethrone the Czar;' a man would be ashamed to follow Socrates. Sir, the impression is universal; yet it is strange."

This attitude, which underlies the war poetry of Rupert Brooke, is manifest in Owen and Sassoon - albeit in individual ways - at the time of their entlistment, and which speaks to the performative model of British masculinity universal before the great war, is an important explanans for many of the tensions and paradoxes in their war poems - the ultimate clause in Sassoon's Lamentations for instance; and, indeed, Owen's Apologia Pro Poemate Meo.

Marie Corelli's Concerns Today

2005-09-19T12:04:00.000-07:00

To support my contention that the specific type and intensity of the late Victorian religious sensibility across all classes (excluding the intellectual and critical elites) that Marie Corelli represents in The Sorrows of Satan are paralleled in contemporary American culture, consider this article detailing the top two most popular motion pictures this very week.

Nb: To what degree this applies to contemporary Canadian culture is a question for the individual to determine.

Poetry

2005-09-18T20:21:00.000-07:00

For your certitude, here is the list of poems from the Penguin collection for the three authors assigned.

ROBERT GRAVES
To Robert Nichols
Recalling War

SIEGRIED SASSOON
A Working Party
'The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still
'The Death-Bed
Prelude: The Troops
Counter-Attack
Base Details
Lamentations
Does it Matter?
Glory of Women
Repression of War Experience

WILFRED OWEN
Exposure
The Dead-Beat
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Disabled
Miners
Apologia Pro Poemate Meo
The ShowInsensibility
A Terre
From 'Wild with All Regrets'
The Send-Off
Mental Cases
Futility
Strange Meeting
The Sentry
Smile, Smile, Smile
Spring Offensive

No Room Change Yet

2005-09-17T12:37:00.000-07:00

We are still in the same rooms this coming week, as the wheels of beaureaucracy grind their slow but relentless course. The staff there are very helpful & effective, but the demands on the rooms, and on changes, in the early weeks is all but unmanageable.

English 340: Course Syllabus

2005-09-14T01:28:00.000-07:00

Course Syllabus & Information

Novels should be read for at least the first time on the following schedule. The Poetry will be read passim and schedule announced in class: one week is dedicated for a concentrated study of the singular phenomenon of the War poets.

Marie Corelli - The Sorrows of Satan
September 12th
September 19th
C.S. Forester - The General
September 26th
October 3rd
Ford Maddox Ford - Parade's End
October 10th
October 17th
October 24th
Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room
October 31st
November 7th
Evelyn Waugh - Vile Bodies
November 14th
November 21st
Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
November 28th
Review and Wrap-Up
December 5th

See support material available on Library Reserve.

Assignment Deadlines: Nb. There is a 3% per day late penalty for assignments, documented medical or bereavement leave excepted.

1. Mid term paper, two thousand words: due October 31st at midnight in the Instructor's Department mailbox. Assignment sheet with suggested topics will be handed out in lecture on October 17th. Criteria will include literary analysis, engagement with course themes and writing mechanics.
2. Group e-text project: in collaboration with the Course Instructor, create a web log dedicated to a distinct topic the works from the course reading list. Groups set & assignment sheet handed out September 26th. Seminar time will be set aside throughout the term to work with the Instructor on this project
3. Individual class presentation: schedule and assignment sheet handed out in seminar. A five minute presentation on one of a choice of topics to be blogged, with five minutes more for class response. Five minutes is a firm limit: the Instructor will blow the whistle ....
4. Final Paper, three thousand five hundred words: due December 8th at midnight in the Instructor's Department mailbox.

Course Approach

The course is working toward an understanding of the imaginative effect of the First World War on British Literature to 1945. The novels on the course reading list are all masterpieces by authors of wide credibility which have, in the main, sunk from common view by accidents of history. The novels are embellished by selections from the great poets of the Great War. The approach to the fiction involves reading them in their historical context and from a close analysis of the literary techniques they manifest.

Course requirement weighting:
10% Course participation
10% Seminar presentation
20% Group blogging project
20% Mid-term paper (approx. 2000 words)
40% Final Paper (approx. 3500 words)

Nb: “Participation requires both participation in seminar and attendance and punctuality at lecture and seminar."

Instructor Contact:

Office Hours: Tuesday and Thursday, 13:30 – 14:20, and by appointment, in rm 6094. Also ogden@sfu.ca and http://firstworldwarlit.blogspot.com. Use campus mail accounts only for email contact, please.

Office Hours

2005-09-12T14:36:00.000-07:00

Thanks to an alert classfellow, I realise that I transposed digits when giving out my Office room number: it is correctly 6094. Again, Office Hours are Tuesday and Thursday 13:30-14:30 or by appointment.

Welcome to English 340 at Simon Fraser University

2005-09-04T01:18:00.000-07:00

Welcome to English 340 at Simon Fraser University: British Literature to 1945.