scholarly journals Meeting the Enemy in World War I Poetry: Cognitive Dissonance as a Vehicle for Theme

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
David Poynor
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Cognitive Dissonance ◽  
Personal Exposure ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Therapeutic Effects ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
World War ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Wilfred Owen

Some World War I poems show an enemy soldier up close. This choice usually proves very effective for expressing the general irony of war, to be sure. However, I submit that showing interaction with the enemy also allows the speaker space to wrestle with internal conflict, guilt, or cognitive dissonance, and that it allows—or even forces—readers to participate in that struggle along with the speaker. While the poets’ writings no doubt had therapeutic effects for the poets themselves, I focus more on the literary effects, specifically arguing that the poems are powerful to us readers since they heighten the personal exposure of the poets’ psyches and since they make us share the dissonance as readers. I consider poems by Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Ford Madox Ford, Herbert Read, and Robert Service.

RECORDING WORLD WARS

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 801-807
Author(s):  
miriam cooke
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Wilfred Owen

World War I inspired countless artists, poets, novelists, and even soldiers across the world to record their unimaginable experiences and to reject the millennial lie: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (it is sweet and appropriate to die for one's country). Early 20th-century European writers like Wilfred Owen, Virginia Woolf, Erich Maria Remarque, and Henri Barbusse have become household names. Less well known are the Arab civilians and soldier writers who struggled on the edges of the war's fronts.

Peace Witness in World War II

Worldview ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-57
Author(s):  
Gordon C. Zahn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Reasonable Estimate ◽  
Simple Estimate ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Book Of The Dead ◽  
Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen, one of the poetic voices stilled by World War I, chose as his subject “war and the pity of war,” finding his poetry in the pity. It can be argued that even then the pity had gone out of war. It is certain that the events of subsequent wars—large and small, local as well as worldwide—have been so pitiless in character and conduct that little or no “poetry” remains.We are three-quarters through a century of unprecedented violence, with the grim prospect of even greater evils tying ahead. In his Twentieth Century Book of the Dead Gil Eliot offers what he considers a reasonable estimate of 100,000,000 “man-made” deaths since 1900. That figure alone is enough to give us pause. But it is not merely the number of deaths that should concern us here, but who is killed and the manner in which the victims are killed. In World War I, of the ten million or so victims, 90 per cent were soldiers. The carnage of World War II was so great and so indiscriminate that an equally simple estimate is almost impossible to contrive.

scholarly journals The Conception of Trauma in Depicting the Battlefields In Wilfred Owen’s War Poetry

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 362
Author(s):  
Salih A. Abdulrahman
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Visual Imagery ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
World War ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Shell Shock ◽  
The People ◽  
Traumatic Symptoms ◽  
Wilfred Owen ◽  
At Home

The paper examines the poetry of Wilfred Owen as a representative of a group of poets who write poetry out of the trenches during and after World War I. Their poetry is generally known as war poetry or trench poetry. It is mostly characterized by the processing of traumatic experience through visual imagery to invoke the readers’ sense of realization to the horrors of war. Some of these poets, including Owen himself, were hospitalized due to shell shock or traumatic symptoms that affected them physically and psychologically. Such traumatic experience changes the poet’s view of war and marks him a witness to its horrors. Owen, one of the greatest of these poets, tries to put the reader in the mid of the battlefield through an extensive use of images, condensed language, and paradoxical statements to show the ugly face of war and warn the people at home of its horrors and urges them not to believe the old lie of the glories of war.

Johnson Goes to War

2019 ◽  
pp. 115-132
Author(s):  
Jack Lynch
Keyword(s):  
War Literature ◽  
Psychological Trauma ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
World War ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Second World ◽  
Civilized World

Jack Lynch’s “Johnson Goes to War” observes that literary histories conventionally link the rise of literary modernism to the collective physical and psychological trauma inflicted by the war of 1914-18. Lynch observes that when we think of Great War literature, we include writers who wrote during the war, like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen; those who reflected on it shortly afterward, such as Ford Madox Ford and Erich Maria Remarque, and those who said little about the war itself but whose sensibilities were shaped by what happened there, a category that contains nearly all the writers usually grouped under High Modernism. But Johnson was there too and played a series of important roles. These include how he sometimes served as a reassuring reminder of the civilized world to which the country hoped to return, while others viewed him as a harsh critic of war and empire. If Johnson influenced thinking about the war, thinking about the war also influenced Johnson. It was the year after the end of the Second World War that the Great Cham became Johnson Agonistes, but that was the culmination of a process of rethinking literary icons in general and, Johnson and particular, that began in Flanders Fields.

Quasi państwa na obszarze poradzieckim – Naddniestrze w rosyjskiej polityce zagranicznej

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 105-125
Author(s):  
Jakub Potulski
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
World War ◽  
Soviet Republic ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Black Sea Coast ◽  
The World ◽  
Eastern Periphery

The main aim of this article is to give an overview of the conflict in a region called Transnistria or Pridnestrovskaya Moldovskaya Respublika (PMR), a quasi-state that has been outside of Moldovan control since 1992. Author focus on historical and emotional aspect of conflict. The turning point of this region’s history was in 1812, when Russia, after the war with Ottoman Turkey annexed part of historic Moldavian territory and named it Bessarabia. During the time, the territory was used as a geostrategic point for Russia’s reaching Black Sea coast. After the World War I Bessarabia become a part of Kingdom of Romania but Soviet Union regarded the area as a territory occupied by Romania. After the World War II the area was formally integrated into the Soviet Union as a Moldavian ASRR. In 1991 during the process of the dissolution of Soviet Union the Moldavian ASRR proclaimed the independence. This proclamation initiated the internal conflict ended with secession of eastern periphery of former Soviet republic. Moscow brought Transnistria under protective umbrella in the international area. The paper will examine the historical roots of the conflict and Russian vision of Transnistria as a part of русский мир.

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

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