Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-216
Author(s):  
Aaron Shaheen
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
World War ◽  
The Way

The epilogue analyzes Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 novel about a soldier who is so pulverized in World War I that he is more machine than man—and yet largely beyond the reach of prosthetic improvement. Like Dadists such as Raoul Hausmann, the novel rebukes the meliorist myth that as long as a disabled soldier has a functioning brain and a firm will, he can use prosthetics to live a life of spiritual and material purpose. As one whose corporeality has been reduced to little more than a brain, Joe Bonham anticipates a complete paradigm shift in which the very notion of the human soul gives way to cybernetics. Published at a time when mechanized warfare had paved the way for nuclear annihilation, Johnny Got His Gun shows that Bergson’s hope for the spiritualization of matter had collapsed at last into the mechanization of spirit.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

Very Serious Books

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Agency ◽  
World War ◽  
Home Office ◽  
Women’S Sexuality ◽  
Surplus Women ◽  
British Home ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Well Of Loneliness

This chapter draws on the records of the British Home Office to reconsider the censorship of two novels by women in the late 1920s: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and the Norah James’s less well-known Sleeveless Errand. It argues that the suppression of these novels was a function of the way they were positioned and received as “serious” works, capable of effecting social change. The chapter argues that specific circumstances in the late 1920s also shaped the perception of the novels. A perception that World War I had radically imbalanced the British population by creating two million "surplus women" created an context where representations of women's sexuality were perceived as especially dangerous. Hall’s representation in The Well of Loneliness of the book as a medium with authority and social agency made both novels seem especially dangerous in this context, and thus, in the eyes of the Home Office, worthy of suppression.

scholarly journals Thomas Mann - Gennem krigens sygdomme mod en ny humanisme

2018 ◽  
pp. 47-64
Author(s):  
Rasmus Navntoft
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Nobel Prize Winner ◽  
Thomas Mann ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
World War ◽  
Major Work ◽  
New Humanism

The German author and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann (1875-1955) perceived World War I as a moral battle against the civilization project rooted in the European enlightenment. Like many other German intellectuals of that time, Mann stresses an opposition between the concept of culture and that of civilization – this conflict is seen as inherent in the European soul – and defends Germany’s right to remain a culture that does not evolve into a civilization. The concept of culture can contain irrational features such as mystical, bloody and terrifying teachings, whereas civilization is characterized by reason, enlightenment, skepticism and hostility towards passion and emotion. In his major work The Magic Mountain (1924) however, Mann tries to overcome this opposition and displays, through the metaphors of the text, that a new humanism is dependent upon a mystical and completely illogical balance between culture and civilization. The main character of the novel does not succeed in finding this balance. But, nonetheless, Mann continues to see the possibilities of a new humanism through this perspective in order to point out a humanistic hope in the shadesof two European world wars.

scholarly journals Dokia Humenna’s Depiction of the Second World War and the OUN in Khreshchatyi iar: How Readers Responded

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Myroslav Shkandrij
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Ukrainian Academy ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Emigre Literature ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Way

<p class="EW-abstract"><strong>Abstract:</strong> When Dokia Humenna’s novel depicting the Second World War, <em>Khreshchatyi iar</em> (Khreshchatyk Ravine), was published in New York in 1956, it created a controversy. Readers were particularly interested in the way activists of the OUN were portrayed. This article analyzes readers’ comments and Humenna’s responses, which are today stored in the archives of the Ukrainian Academy of Science in New York. The novel is based on a diary Humenna kept during the German occupation of Kyiv in the years 1941-1943.</p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Dokia Humenna, <em>Khreshchatyi iar</em>, Second World War, OUN, Émigré Literature, Reader Response

Did Mikhail Sholokhov Write The Quiet Don?

2020 ◽  
pp. 209-230
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Unpublished Manuscript ◽  
Nobel Committee ◽  
Magnum Opus

This chapter discusses the novel “The Quiet Don” and the controversy over its authorship. It briefly recounts some of the relevant events of World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Russian Civil War. The chapter focuses on Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov who was awarded by the Nobel Committee in 1945 for the literature prize on his magnum opus, the four-volume The Quiet Don. It also looks into the initial claim that Sholokhov stole the book manuscript for The Quiet Don in a map case that belonged to a White Guard who had been killed in battle. It talks about an anonymous author known as Irina Medvedeva-Tomashevskaia, who wrote several historical studies and claimed that Sholokhov had plagiarized an unpublished manuscript of Fedor Dmitrievich Kriukov.

Two Tolstoys and a Lenin—Temperance and Prohibition in Russia

2021 ◽  
pp. 25-52
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Leo Tolstoy ◽  
World War ◽  
Joseph Stalin ◽  
State Revenue ◽  
State Finance ◽  
Leon Trotsky ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The Way

Part I of the book—covering Europe’s continental empires—begins with Chapter 2 on the Russian Empire. The state’s overreliance on revenues from the imperial vodka monopoly is laid bare beginning with the temperance revolts of the 1850s, when the empire was almost bankrupted when peasants refused to drink. The understanding of temperance as opposition to imperial autocracy is traced through the antistatist teachings of Leo Tolstoy and early Bolsheviks, including the prohibitionists Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Despite official opposition to “subversive” temperance activism, at the outbreak of World War I in 1914 Tsar Nicholas II made Russia the first prohibitionist state, though the loss of state revenue paved the way for the revolutions of 1917. Lenin maintained a prohibition against the vodka trade, which was only undone after Lenin’s death by Joseph Stalin, who reintroduced the tsarist-era vodka monopoly in the interests of state finance.

scholarly journals The Image of Ion I. C. Brătianu in The Foreign Press of 1916

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-264
Author(s):  
Gheorghe Calcan
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
International Level ◽  
World War ◽  
National History ◽  
Military Camp ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Military ◽  
National Borders ◽  
The Way

Abstract Our paper aims to highlight the way Ion I. C. Brătianu was presented outside national borders in a fundamental moment of our national history, namely the integration of Romania into the operations of World War I in 1916. At that landmark moment, Ion I. C. Brătianu was Prime Minister of the country and was perceived abroad as the most powerful personality in the Romanian decisionmaking space, on whom the very decision to enter the war was hanging on. Foreign observers considered that Brătianu would not integrate with the war other than besides the military camp and in the moment that would definitely ensure their final victory. In order to sketch his image at international level we mainly used the information provided by the French press of the time (especially newspaper “Le Figaro”).

scholarly journals The Impact of World War I on Middle East “Arabs” in Awwad’s “Al-Raghif”: A Cultural Perspective

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-36
Author(s):  
Lateef Wisam Hamid
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
World War ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Great War

Abstract My paper will explore the genre of war narrative from a cultural perspective, namely the impact of the Great War on Arabs in the novel Al-Raghif (The Loaf’) in 1939 by the Lebanese novelist Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad, as it is the first Arabic novel which is totally concerned with WWI and its longlasting consequences: hunger, despair and the elusive promise of freedom to Arabs.

scholarly journals Cultural Trauma – The Case of the Winner

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (s1) ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Zoltán Bretter
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Cultural Shock ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
The Way

AbstractMy study is an analysis of the emergence of the “Golden Dream” narrative in Romania, right after World War I. Along the way, I make some theoretical contributions to cultural trauma studies. ‘Winner’ and ‘loser’ are terms used to define fixed situations. Usually, only the loser (the victim, defeated) might suffer a trauma, while the occurrence of trauma is denied for the winner (the perpetrator, victor). We shall dig a little deeper and wider, demonstrating that Romania, an overall winner of WWI, will face, right after victory, a ‘cultural shock’ which has to be repressed, as part of the “Golden Dream” narrative. Through a detailed, economic, social and political analysis, I’ll be trying to argue that a shattering trauma has engendered in Romanian society; yet another addition to a whole ‘traumatic history’. The ensuing orthodox ethnonationalism takes its root from this trauma. From time-to-time, we will take a comparative glance at the trauma of the loser, particularly when we will be discussing the omissions of an otherwise seamless narrative.

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