World War II

1
VirginiaWoolfU.K. b.1882d.1941
2
Virginia Woolf (U.K. 1882-1941)A Room of Ones
Own (1929)

• Mental instability, abuse
• 1905 Bloomsbury Group 1912 m. Leonard Woolf
• Brilliant innovative Modernist writer
• Hogarth Press
• Angel in the House

• 1928 Lectures on Women Creativity, Newnham
  College
• Shakespeares Sister Essay genre Anglo-American
  Feminist Literary Criticism
• Rec. Films The Hours, Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway

3
World War I 1914-1918See 20th Cent. Timeline
(Davis et al. 1346-1351)

• 1917-1922 Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War in
  Russia
• 1920 Womens Suffrage in U.S. Irish
  independence Gandhi leads Indian independence
• 1922 Soviet Union

• 1924 Lenin dies, Stalin comes to power
• 1925 Hitler, Mein Kampf U.S. Scopes monkey
  Trial
• Late 1920s German Black Friday U.S. Stock
  Market crash1930s Depression

4
1924 Lenin dies Joseph Stalin gains
power.Stalin perfects Lenins tactics of
terror.Communist rule becomestotalitarian
dictatorship fueled by paranoia.1930's
Stalinist Terror peaksPurges claim millions of
victimsAkhmatovas friends, fellow writers,
her only son, Lev Gumilev.1933, 1935 Lev
Gumilev arrested, imprisoned, threatened with
death
Anna Ahkmatova b. Anya GorenkoRussia, 1889-1966
5
Akhmatovas Requiem(wr. 1935-1940 banned in
USSR)

• Alienated by sick dehumanized society
• Realist protest death of individual freedom,
  negation of family ties
• Realist subject social realities, misery of
  ordinary peoples lives
• Arts critical function

• Romantic individ-ualism of visionary
  (confessional) poet as national conscience I
  (controlled) emotion to remember bear witness
  for silenced community.

6
Requiem, cont.

• Organicism poetic expression creates its own
  poetic forms Mixed points of view, style, form -
  varies among poems in cycle
• Modernist fragments comprise the cohesive whole

• Readers co-create meaning, but Akhmatova not
  distainful of general audience
• Powerful simplicity, directness, concrete imagery
  (rejects obscure symbolism)

7
World War II (1939-1945)

• WWI not war to end all wars tensions brew
  1920s-1930s
• economic conflicts competition among colonial
  powers
• rise of dictators ultra-nationalism
• world-wide depression

• Fascism (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco) reverse
  decline of West, preserve pure European
  culture Axis incl. Japan
• Democracies Allies
• Communism Stalin, totalitarianism

8
Where Are the War Poets?

• 1939Appeasement fails, war begins
• TLS chastises U.K. poets for failing to do their
  duty, calling upon them to sound trumpet call
  to fight this monstrous threat to belief
  freedom

• Cecil Day Lewis responds for many writers in
  Where Are the War Poets?. . . .

9
Where Are the War Poets? cont.

• They who in folly mere greed
• Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
• Borrow our language now bid
• Us to speak up in freedoms cause.

• It is the logic of our times,
• No subject for immortal verse
• That we who lived by honest dreams
• Defend the bad against the worst.

10
WW II, cont.

• Unprecedented scale of world conflict
  devastation (aerial bombing)
• Science, technology, industrialism used for mass
  murder
• Genocide in the Death Camps

• Atomic bomb (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) power to bring
  on apocalypse
• Civilian casualties, nightmare of suffering
  devastation
• United Nations re-build hope for future?

11
WW II The Aftermath

• Politically defines world powers for next 40
  years
• Raises profound moral. spiritual political
  questions re religious faith, human capacity for
  evil - triumph of the dark side

• Global guilt passive immorality of people,
  nations who stood by did nothing
• Challenges Enlighten-ment faith in progress,
  human reason, science, education

12
Post-WWII Existentialism

• Existentialism (e.g. Sartre, Camus) human
  condition absurd, alienated angst-ridden
  --cast alone into a senseless alien universe
  (without meaning or value)--death our only
  certainty --radical responsibility for creating
  meaning, value of our existence Existence
  precedes essence

• 20th-Century Literature of the Absurd (Kafka
  his heirs) depicts surreal, radically
  meaningless, randomly violent modern world, where
  ethical justice spiritual values seem to have
  no place or power.
• The Metamorphosis (wr 1912 pub. 1915, 1948)

13
The books we needare the kind that act upon
uslike a nightmare,that make us sufferlike the
deathof someone we lovemore than ourselves.. .
. . A book should serveas an axfor the frozen
seainside us.Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
14
Post-WWII Art/Literature in Crisis

• Survivor guilt, betrayal, withdrawal inner
  emigration (Hannah Arendt)
• Failure of the imagination before the
  unthinkable, loss of reasons to go on living,
  make sense of senseless horrors

• Heated debate
• What kind of art, literature is viable, equal to
  profound issues raised by WWII?
• Can art/lit help restore human values in
  post-WWII global society?
• Sartre (and others) call for Post-WWII artists
  and writers to meet these challenges.

15
Holocaust Literature

• Jean-Paul Sartre post- WWII arte engage
  authenticity of form and feeling paramount (vs.
  Romantic sublime egotism art for arts sake
  frivolous irresponsible)
• New Global consciousness

• Wiesels vow of silence (1945), then silence
  broken (Night, 1960)
• Eye witness - Bear witness testify to the
  unthinkable horrors
• Obligation to the dead Do not forget!

16
Elie Wiesel (b. 1928, Romania)
1986 Nobel Peace Prize one of the most
important spiritual leaders and guides in an age
when violence, repression and racism continue to
characterise the world.Wiesels hard-won
belief that evil can be overcome originated in
personal experience of Hitlers death camps and
soul-wrenching testimonies that Wiesel has
widenedto embrace the sufferings of all
repressed peoples and races.
Wiesels message is one of peace, atonement and
human dignity.
17
Wiesels Death of My Father(From Legends of
Our Time, 1968 rpt. 1982)

• Rejects fiction for confessional memoir,
  autobiography -acts of memory with truth value,
  authentic
• Confront the past
• Survivor guilt Healing power of storytelling

• Pose tough, probing questions Where was God?
  What happened to ethics, justice? What meaning
  can religious rites confer?
• Modernist search for meaning w/new urgency - will
  human imagination fail again?

18
Takenishis The Rite (1963)

• Japanese children of 1945 begin to tell their
  stories of sorrow, loss, grief in 1950s-60s.
  Shares Wiesels themes death rites, acts of
  remembering
• Fictionalizes to distance? Survivors guilt,
  incomprehension

• Semi-autobiographical retelling of Hiroshima
  Aug. 1945, Takenishi 16-yr-old schoolgirl large
  no. of Japanese school kids killed 140,000 dead
  by end 1945 60,000 die of longer term effects
• Long silence, denial

19
The Rite, cont.

• Setting one long night 10 yrs. later when Aki
  cant sleep, suppressed memories flood back
• Adapts Modernist narrative techniques to create
  authentic representation of psychological reality

• Modernist rendering of Akis past memories
  present consciousness free-associational, stream
  of consciousness
• achronological, fragmented, disjointed
  flashbacks/forwards broken pieces of film

20
The Rite, cont.

• Modernist search of meaning - look back look
  within at what has been repressed
• Remembering frees her of the past, by confronting
  its horrors, performing the death rites left
  undone

• Readers too must experience Akis dislocation,
  confusion, alienation, etc. in search for meaning
• World Literature(e.g. TFA, 1958)

21
Garcia Marquez
Kundera