English 109 - Cora Agatucci
Survey of Western World Literature: Modern

The 20th Century: World War II & Its Aftermath
 [Literary-Historical Contexts] - PRINT VERSION
 Eng 109 Lecture Outline: Week #9, Spring 2003

Recommended Background Reading: 
 "The 20th Century: The Modern Age & Emerging World Culture" (Davis pp. 1345-1363)

Akhmatova’s 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 people’s lives

Art’s critical function

Romantic individualism of visionary poet tempered by Russian communal tradition: bear witness & remember for the national conscience, personal, subjective "I" (distanced) & emotion controlled

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)

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

"Where Are the War Poets?"

1939: Appeasement fails, war begins

TLS (Dec. 1939) chastises poets for failing to "do their duty," should sound "trumpet call" to fight "monstrous threat to belief & freedom"

Day Lewis responds: "Where Are the War Poets?" .

 . .

"They who in folly & mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now & bid
Us to speak up in freedom’s 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."

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?

WW II: The Aftermath

Politically defines world powers for next 40 years

Morally, spiritually raises profound 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 Enlightenment faith in progress, human reason, science, education

Post-WWII Responses:

Existentialism (Sartre, Camus): human condition = absurd, senseless, useless; isolated beings cast into alien universe w/o truth, value, meaning; must accept radical responsibility for one’s being, existence

Literature of the Absurd (Kafka’s heirs) the "real" is surreal

Artistic autonomy: must break from past, its cultural traditions, & a world that’s lost
all sense of justice, meaning, morality

Art in Crisis
Survivor guilt & "inner emigration" (Hannah Arendt) - betrayal, withdrawal
Failure of the imagination before the unthinkable, loss of reasons to go on living & make sense of the senseless horrors
Heated debate: What kind of art, literature is viable, equal to the profound issues raised by WWII--its crises, disasters, horrors?
Can art/lit help restore human values in post-WWII global society?

Holocaust Literature

Jean-Paul Sartre: post- WWII "arte engage" authenticity of form and feeling paramount (vs. Romantic sublime egotism & art for art’s sake = frivolous & irresponsible)

New Global consciousness

Wiesel’s "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!

Wiesel’s "Death of My Father"
(From Legends of Our Time, 1968; rpt. 1982)

Rejects fiction for confessional memoir, autobiography -acts of memory w/ 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?

Takenishi’s "The Rite" (1963)

Japanese children of 1945 begin to tell their stories of sorrow, loss, grief in 1950s-60s. Shares Wiesel’s 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

Setting: one long night 10 yrs. later when Aki can’t sleep, & denied memories flood back

Modernist narrative techniques create more authentic representation of psychological reality

Modernist rendering of Aki’s past memories & present consciousness: free-associational, stream of consciousness, achronological, fragmented, disjointed flashbacks/forwards = broken pieces of film

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 Aki’s dislocation, confusion, alienation, etc. in search for meaning

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