scholarly journals Futurist Suggestions in the War Poems by Josip (Sibe) Miličić

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-82
Author(s):  
Nicoletta Cabassi

With the opening of the twentieth century, the beneficial river of the avant-gardes seemed to flood the entire European continent in a happy contamination of national cultures, giving life to an authentic supranational koine of artists: it was sometimes fusion of forms, styles, environments, cultures, a salutary effort to rejuvenate languages. The particular attention of the Italian Futurists to the new national realities was among the factors of particular attraction to the movement for South Slavs whose representative was Josip (Sibe) Miličić, who called for cultural and political renewal of his country. His direct encounter with Marinetti and Boccioni seems to leave its mark on his poetry both structurally and thematically: in the collection from 1914, Miličić reveals a new sensibility and a new rhythm: in one of his war lyrics, the futurist suggestions materialize in his first onomatopoeic attempt, suitable to undermine the lyricism of the verse by intensifying the link between the phonic aspect and the meaning. Despite their common interventionism, the Great War found the Croat and the Italian Futurists on opposite political positions concerning the Dalmatian islands and the Italian expansionism on the Adriatic. The poet’s war experience lead him to a “mature” phase starting in the twenties with his first article-manifesto. At this time he was able to reprocess his own critical identity: affirming his deeply anti-materialist and anti-industrial spiritualism, his standpoints by then had become very distant from Marinetti’s insights.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ailish Wallace-Buckland

<p>In January 1932, the Sydney-based lifestyle magazine Health and Physical Culture published an article titled ‘The Menace of Effeminacy’. This article, written by Carl Hertzig, and read by magazine-subscribers across the Tasman, documented anxieties around the state of men and masculinity following the upheaval of the Great War. Touching on topics such as gender, psychology, eugenics, and sexuality this article and its concerns represent those that this thesis explores in order to understand what the ‘fear of effeminacy’ actually meant for New Zealanders during the interwar years (c.1918-1939). This thesis documents and analyses contemporary discussions of male sexuality and masculinity through a series of sources in order to establish the ways in which these concepts were understood in interwar New Zealand. Firstly, it examines some of the key pieces of legislation and reports that demonstrated official approaches, and ways of thinking, towards mental defectives, sexual offenders, and those with war neuroses. It then explores medical journals, and the dissertations of medical students; and finally, it analyses parts of popular print culture in Aotearoa/New Zealand, such as magazines and newspapers, in order to investigate and piece together the landscape in which said anxieties around effeminacy, masculinity, mental stability, and other deviations from the societally prescribed norm met. This thesis approaches these primary sources in such a way that acknowledges the evolutionary framework of understanding that was pervasive in medical circles during this era.  By thus examining the connections between constructions of the male body, homosexuality and effeminacy, late nineteenth to early twentieth century ideas around eugenics, and psychology and psychiatry, this work further uncovers the state of masculinity and male sexuality in New Zealand during the interwar period. This thesis argues that the ‘threat’ to masculinity perceived in a variety of venues was a mixture of anxieties around physical and mental wounds inflicted by the Great War; population concerns exacerbated by the exposure of the health-standards of troops, and worries of how to recover and reconstruct a virile society following four years of strife; concerns at the apparent loosening of sexual mores, and the changing manifestations of both masculinity and femininity; and ever increasing interest in the psychology of self, sexuality, and society. It adds to existing work on post-World War One masculinity by centring New Zealand discussions and understandings in a way that contributes to the broader literature on New Zealand twentieth-century masculinity, psychology and psychiatry, eugenics, and male sexuality.</p>


Author(s):  
María Cristina Pividori

Although the First World War has become history by now, the memory of the war continues to be repeatedly fictionalised: retrospectively inspired narratives are often regarded as more genuine and far-reaching than historical or documentary accounts in their rendition of the past. Yet, memory is creatively selective, reflecting a highly-conflicted process of sifting and discerning what should be remembered, neglected or amplified from the stream of war experience. In his book about Pat Barker, Mark Rawlinson argues that “historical fiction has been transformed in the post-war period by the way writers have exploited the porous and unstable demarcation between fiction and no fiction, stories and history” (14). Jill Dawson’s The Great Lover (2009), Geoff Akers’s Beating for the Light: The Story of Isaac Rosenberg (2006) and Robert Edric’s In Zodiac Light (2008) have not become best sellers like Barker’s Regeneration trilogy; yet, they too represent the predominant commemorative drift in contemporary British fiction about the Great War. Without doubt, these three authors have followed in Barker’s steps in their purpose of holding a mirror to real people and real events in the past and of deciphering the deleted text of ‘the war to end all wars.’ However, while Barker chose to write about the often-anthologised Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Dawson, Akers and Edric base their narratives on the writings, and lives, of Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney respectively. My discussion of these three novels will explore the various ways in which the past can be accessed and interpreted from the present and represented in fiction. The authors’ decisions as to what historical instances to unravel do not just reveal the relation that contemporary British fiction entertains with the Great War and with history, but also how the past erupts in the present to interrogate it. Taking three salient features of Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” (1988)—intertextuality, parody and paratextuality—as my theoretical points of departure, I will explore the dominant frameworks and cultural conditions (that is the propagation of either patriotic or protest readings) within which the Great War has been narrated in the novels and the new approaches, opportunities and ethical implications of using historical and literary sources to re-scribe a previously non-existent version of the lives of the iconic Great War Poets.


Author(s):  
David A. Rennie

Rather than being defined by their membership of a particular constituency of ideological or sociopolitical war experience, writers hold and express complex and evolving views on the war. Studying authors’ careers reveals not only that their writing was influenced by the war, but that, simultaneously, the circumstances of their artistic and professional development shaped the manner and mode of their literary reactions. More than has been fully appreciated, American writers drew on native literary and historical culture to assess the Great War. Ultimately, however, American writing about the war was idiosyncratic, complex, and subject to change, as writers’ ongoing reactions to the war were influenced by the intricate group of intrapersonal and interpersonal variables that shaped professional authorship.


2020 ◽  
pp. 303-314
Author(s):  
Stefan Manz ◽  
Panikos Panayi

This chapter begins by highlighting the main findings of the book, including the globalization of internment by the Empire during the Great War and the consequences for individuals and their families, but also the fact that Britain treated those it had incarcerated in a humane way. The chapter examines the return to Germany, its consequences for individuals, and the way in which the German authorities dealt with the former residents of the British Empire. These people, who may not have seen their homeland for decades, made efforts to preserve the memory of their experiences, along with former civilian and military prisoners who came from other states at war with Germany. While the memory of internment may have survived into the interwar years, it disappeared in the second half of the twentieth century, but came back to life in the early twenty-first century, inspired by the centenary of the Great War.


Author(s):  
Tomas Balkelis

This chapter focuses on the transformative effect that the outbreak of the Great War and German occupation had on the civilians in Lithuania. It traces the early war experience of local Catholic and Lutheran Lithuanian peasants and Jews. The focus here is on their emotional responses to war and everyday strategies of survival in the context of various German occupation policies. The experiences of locally mobilized conscripts are also discussed to track down their personal transformations from civilians into soldiers, as well as the massive displacement of war refugees and the emergence of refugee relief networks. The chapter argues that the German policy to introduce ethnic markers among the multi-ethnic population of Lithuania as a means of more efficient colonial control led to its nationalization and the increase of social and ethnic tensions.


Author(s):  
Nimisha Barton

This chapter cites Yolanda Foldes's 1937 novel about a Hungarian family in interwar Paris, in which the character Klari Barabas stumbles into the middle of a lovers' quarrel involving Greek Christos and his French wife. It analyses the misfortunes of fictional Christos and his French wife, which suggest men's work, missing wages, and marital discord that were intertwined in the mixed and immigrant working-class households sprouting up throughout France after the Great War. It also discusses the twin middle-class ideals of the male breadwinner and the femme au foyer that governed early twentieth century economic and social life. The chapter recounts how marriage became the most reliable legal means of securing access to a male breadwinner and his wages by the early twentieth century, especially in the event of the union's demise. It talks about alimentary pensions that were paid regularly by estranged husbands and were enforced by officials at the behest of French and foreign wives themselves.


1932 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry S. Dennison

In the early days of factory management, when the problems and conditions were relatively simple, it fell to the lot of all sorts of human folk to manage the various jobs involved. Each used his own peculiar method and, naturally enough, it came into general belief that ability in management was an instinctive knack, that managers were born, not made, that few if any rules could be laid down, and that little could be learned by one from another. Even in the earliest days, a small handful of men called attention to the fact that management measures and forms of organization could be better or worse adapted to their uses; but for generations the suggestion passed unheeded.As the problems and conditions of factory management grew more complex and exacting, more men came to believe that the art of management was something more than an intuitive and highly personal knack. Before the Great War, a fair nucleus was beginning to study the art from the point of view of the forces involved, and with an eye to causes and effects. And the war experience of manufacturing strange materials, shifting conditions upside down, built up this nucleus into a very fair working minority.


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