Wars Flashcards
What are authors’ aims when writing about war?
- authors aim to recast the cultural force of literature itself
aim to continue to shock and have an effect - experiments with form, rhyme scheme etc. to handle the situation (what do we need to create a powerful voice?)
What did Marinetti write and what did he say?
‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’
“we will glorify war - the world’s only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women”
Who led vorticism?
Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound
When were the only two issues of Blast?
1914 and 1915
What did ‘Long Live the Vortex’ say in Blast 1?
“Blast presents an art of individuals”
What partly inspired this statement? (the one in ‘Long Live the Vortex’ of Blast 1) “Blast presents an art of individuals”
- inspired by syndicalism of Georges Sorel (this was a movement desiring the transfer the ownership of the control of the means of production/ distribution to worker’s unions)
- 1910-1914 strike action - separatist action, not as a group movement but one of individual detachment
Was Blast 1 for or against futurism?
- anti-futurist
- problem with futurism = in praising mass modernisation/ revolution, you lose all critical distance from it, you become symptomatic of it
- Lewis wanted Vorticism to be a separatist art, movement asserting individuals’ detachment from masses
(this is exemplified in ‘Enemy of the Stars’ in Arghol
Why was ‘Enemy of the Stars’ so difficult?
- not constructed for mass market to passively consume it, instead the individual has to work with it to make something of it and with it
- agonism takes place between author and reader, wants you to struggle, and thus you have an individual reaction
(especially in context of war effort that is mobilising masses)
What did Lewis’ ‘The European War and Great Communities’ in Blast 2 say? (what was the aim?)
- sarcastic, harsh parody of what he believes are the contemporary attitudes towards war
- aimed to shock people out of complacency and concurrency
What did Lewis’ ‘‘The Crowd Master’ in Blast 2 say?
- compares the Vorticist to the role of the police-man herding the crowd
- shapes a sense of the crowd but also then shows how the Vorticist is separate from them - he achieves individualism through their part of being the mass
What did Lewis say to Marinetti?
“you Wops insist too much on the Machine”
What is notable about Lewis’ painting ‘A Battery Shelled’?
- soldiers are welded and same colour as shells etc. “human cartridges” as Lewis called them in ‘The European War and Great Communities’
Theme of WW1 in Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (1925)
- according to Woolf’s own notes, she wanted to present
“the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side”
but as the novel progresses it becomes clear how, in post-war London, civilians and veterans alike are indelibly marked by war
- similarly, (through its persistent use of stream of consciousness)
novel suggests that the familiar temporal measures of time and history, symbolised by the ringing of Big Ben, are insufficient
“Big Ben striking the half-hour” repeats frequently
- need a new form of representation
- new focus on the interior clock of the mind is needed to encapsulate modern experience
Theme of WW1 in To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (1927)
- by equating the Great War with the winds of change destroying and dismantling the Ramsay family’s great Victorian house, theTime Passessection suggests the first World War destroyed the social conventions/ customs of 19th-century England
“[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.] “
Theme of WW1 in Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf (1922)
- Levenson: at the end of the novel, a noise sounds from across the English Channel - “not at this distance,” she thought, “it is the sea”
- image discloses the paradoxical, unassimilable space opened by the war
- it seems impossible to determine the distance of violence, to know how far or close it stands
novel joins the imaginative project of Eliot and others - it undoes a map of the world, it records the loss of an intelligible diagram, the picture of modernity no longer has clear outlines: space loses sense
