Postcards from the Trenches: Literature of the First World War

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The First World War, or the “Great War,” is one of the defining events of the Twentieth-Century that continues to grasp the public imagination. The unprecedented scale of devastation and mass casualty unleashed by this industrialized warfare was an unassimilable experience that many have sought to represent through different narrative and textual forms. This survey course is designed to introduce students to a wide range of literature that emerged from the Great War experience, including soldiers’ memoirs and trench poetry, auto-fictional writings by nurses, experimental literary texts, and letters by colonial soldiers. The goal is to examine how each text conveys a unique attempt to represent the experience of the Great War; how patterns and tropes of representation echo across groups of texts; and how these groups of texts then speak to one another. Our objective is to understand the Great War experience through a prismatic lens–examining how the unique experiences of different groups of participants in the Great War, like soldiers, medical personnel and civilians, are represented through different literary styles and genres, while also being sensitive to the connections between these styles and genres as they lend themselves to these different groups. We will examine how civilian-texts like Mrs Dalloway and The Return of the Soldier work in conversation with soldiers' trench-writings like Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, nurses' life-writings like The Forbidden Zone, and colonial war-fiction like Across the Black Waters. We will also spend time on the representation of the Great War in film by analyzing the cult-classic Lawrence of Arabia, and the Academy Award-winning 1917.