Lit, Art, Film of WWI

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Students participating in this timely – and time travel – seminar in summer 2019 will experience some unique opportunities. The first is a visit to the site of the new DC WWI memorial which is under construction. Joe Weishaar, the architect whose design won the rights to construct this memorial, has been a revered and favorite guest lecturer for the past three years to this course. He credits his engagement with GU students as further inspiration to some of the choices he’s made in revising his design to get the narrative “right” as well as engage with DC politics! I’m in process of coordinating our meeting Mr. Weishaar on this site remembering the Great War via the U.S. participation. Secondly, this summer’s students will meet for one of their classes at the Lib of Congress to enjoy the expertise of research librarians there who have recently newly curated the Library’s holdings of this war. You will select which archival artifact you would like to work with to create your paper for the course. You will engage in primary research which is very exciting and also, pragmatically speaking, provides a boon for that cv! Thirdly, the last several years have prompted many historians; literary, visual and performance artists/art and history curators; technology experts; and film makers to re-visit the endless causes, details, and effects of this war. Might you be interested in experiencing what the final moments of the war sounded like? Join us and this experience is yours. The somberly sonorous voice of Yeats in his 1920 “The Second Coming” perhaps most wondrously confronts both the horror of WWI, the brute itself, and the ensuing madness unleashed upon a new century perceiving its ideals lost but not gone: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre. . . Things fall apart. . . The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere [t]he ceremony of innocence is drowned. . . And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, [s]louches toward Bethelehem to be born?” Modernism’s vision ghosts the war’s bitter but resilient afterbirth, offering us a battlefield strewn with individual suffering and resurrection beside the mass shame and redemption. And we, the 2019 readers in English 168.1, enter the surreal fray begun in 1914 of chivalric courage that becomes the sacrificial charge to rescue friend and the barbaric attack to defeat foe. This course invites its participants to read a medley of perspectives and genres of WWI literature in order to ask how and why this war both reflected and catapulted change in the ways we understand and value life, provoking such questions as where is our present or immediate identity, both individual and collective, in light of this war’s influence? How did this particular war cause chivalry to give way to the monstrous? What happens to perception when the beautifully strong becomes the grotesque freak? Did we land in the abyss of the Great War’s aftermath because we leapt from Edwardian extravagance or Victorian hubris or even complacency? How might we justify an idealistic regard (nostalgia) for the past, given our shattered memory? How do we sustain a hope that both trembles before and yearns toward a future in the wake of futility? Why did this world experience (the Great War and its effects), which destroyed the lives of so many, also propel liberation for women? To what degree did it also shift economic class identities? How and to what effect did its technological advances – even with humanitarian aims - participate in moral degradation? Why did so many artists respond NOT with anger or grief but instead with cynical detachment – did they reflect the sympathies of the masses or were they a movement unto themselves? And given the unique (Heroic? Showy? Game-Changing?) role of the U.S. in this war, how has our own nation’s history in global fighting been shaped by this war? How do we, living in the U.S. as both citizens and scholars, remember this war? How does the Great War’s Art of its own time and of our time provoke us to re-view this war and our role within it as well as on its borders? Isn’t it intriguing to consider that the language of the performing arts, such as theatre (a space of entertaining audiences and perspectives), resounds in identifying battlegrounds, often referenced as theatres of war, and the medical operating room, often marked as the surgical theatre. Further, how were entertainment halls – theatres – sites of recruiting soldiers as were propagandist posters appealing to women’s power, the value of family, and an individual’s right and responsibility to enact moral duty? Participants in this course are encouraged and expected to ponder such questions and to create other queries from the readings for each class. Class discussions are comprised of these critical thinking exchanges – everyone assumes a voice here. This trying out and exchange of ideas – including the arguing between positions – are meant to lead you to the creation and development of dynamic arguments in class conversations, a presentation focused on some aspect of WWI, and your term paper for the course.