The Great War and Modern Memory
Language: English
Pages: 432
ISBN: 0199971951
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on publication in 1970. Today, Fussell's landmark study remains as original and gripping as ever: a literate, literary, and unapologetic account of the Great War, the war that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world.
This brilliant work illuminates the trauma and tragedy of modern warfare in fresh, revelatory ways. Exploring the work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen, Fussell supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for those writers who--with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning--most effectively memorialized World War I as an historical experience. Dispensing with literary theory and elevated rhetoric, Fussell grounds literary texts in the mud and trenches of World War I and shows how these poems, diaries, novels, and letters reflected the massive changes--in every area, including language itself--brought about by the cataclysm of the Great War. For generations of readers, this work has represented and embodied a model of accessible scholarship, huge ambition, hard-minded research, and haunting detail.
Restored and updated, this new edition includes an introduction by historian Jay Winter that takes into account the legacy and literary career of Paul Fussell, who died in May 2012.
thesis, brilliantly titled-the war had certainly handed hIm the first three words-The Illogical Element in English Poetry . "The Illogical Element in the Experience of Robert Graves" might be the .t~tle of the episode that closes Good-bye to All That. He takes up the posmon of Professor of English Literature at the ridiculous Royal Egyptian University, Cairo. The student essays are so funny and hopeless that as an honest man he can't go on. After saying that "Egypt gave me plenty of caricature
the world, whose waters have the power to remove the scars of battle wo~~ds. But for a generation to whom terms like heroism and decency and nobtltty conveyed meanings that were entirely secure, it was a heady read and an unforgc::ttable source of images. The general familiarity with it and the ease with which it could be applied to the events of the war can be gauged from this: in May, 19l5, an illustrated weekly headed an ac~ount o~ a trench skirmish won by the British with a caption in the
relievers and relieved are repeatedly conceived as "liturgy" and "ritual words" (28), and Jones explains the conventionality of this trench antiphon in a note: These coming from and these going to the front line used almost a liturgy, analogous to the seafaring "Who are you pray" employed by shipmasters hailing a passing boat. So used we to say : "Who are you," and the regiment would be named. And again we would say: "What's it like, mate," and the invariable reply, even in the more turbulent
"Their Name Liveth For Evermore." It was not so in America, which has always done very well without a consciousness of a national literary canon. In the absence of a line of important "philosophic" poets running back to the fourteenth century, in a vacuum devoid of a Chaucer, a Spenser, a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Keats, a Wordsworth, a Tennyson, a Browning, an Arnold, and with no Malory or Bunyan either, American writing about the war tends to be spare and one-dimensional. The best-known American
pronouncedfuckin', and one exhibited one's quasi-poetic talents by treating it with the greatest possible originality as a movable "internal" modifier and placing it well inside the word to be modified. As in "I can't stand no more of that Macbloody-fuckin'-Conochie." Perhaps hell was overworked, although occasionally, when used in some surprising context, it could be telling: "During the night," one soldier writes in his diary, "we dug in shell holes. A night of great suspense. Verily Verily