gb - Englisches Seminar - Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Seminare
050 638 Klawitter
The First World War in Poetry, Autobiography and Fiction, 4 CP
2 st. mi 10-12 GB 6/137 Nord
The First World War (1914-1918) was one of the great traumas of the twentieth
century. The horrific experience of trench warfare elicited a great number of literary
texts which were to exert a strong influence on the formation of collective memories.
This is particularly true of Britain, where the ‘Great War’ still informs the official
culture of war commemoration and plays a considerable part in the reaffirmation of
national identity.
The seminar focusses on the early literary engagement with the war, namely the
poetry produced by the so-called ‘War Poets’, but also narrative fiction and memoirs
which were written in the decade after the war. We will begin our discussions with
Edmund Blunden’s memoirs Undertones of War (1928) and Robert Graves’s
autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929), which are regarded as classic accounts of
the Western Front. Four sessions of the seminar will be devoted to the reading of war
poetry. This will include Charles Hamilton Sorley’s “All the Hills and Vales Along”,
Siegfried Sassoon’s “They”, Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and Isaac
Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches”. The short stories chosen for discussion
are Richard Aldington’s “The Case of Lieutenant Hall” and Winifred Holtby’s “So
Handy for the Fun Fair”. While acknowledging the documentary dimension of all
these texts, our investigation will be primarily geared towards a consideration of the
expressive potential of each genre and its wider function within the cultural
representation of war.
Participants should purchase the Penguin editions of Undertones of War and
Goodbye to All That. The shorter texts will be made available on Blackboard.
Assessment/requirements: Übung: presentation in class; Seminar: 12-15-page term
paper (wissenschaftliche Hausarbeit).