scholarly journals “Like being trapped in a drum”: The Poetics of Resonance in Frances Itani’s Deafening

Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė

This paper considers how Frances Itani’s Deafening imaginatively rethinks our understanding of the Great War in the age of postmemory. Seeing as the novel is set in Canada and Europe during the First World War and takes as its protagonist a deaf woman, the poetic attention given to the senses as a horizon of phenomenological experience magnifies the moral bonds that the characters establish in defi ance of both deafness and death. Guided by the theoretical reasoning of Marianne Hirsch, Elaine Scarry, and Alison Landsberg as well as contemporary phenomenological thinking, most significantly that of Edward S. Casey, Steven Connor, Michel Serres, and Jean-Luc Nancy, this paper examines how the novel’s attentiveness to the materiality of the body in regard to the ethical collisions of sound and silence as well as life and death contributes to a poetics of resonance that generates prosthetic memories, turning the anonymous record of war into a private experience of moral endurance inscribed on the ear of historical legacy.

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Elodie Rousselot

In her 1998 novel Another World, Pat Barker draws from a topic on which she has written previously with great success—the First World War and the experiences of its combatants—and yet approaches that topic from a completely different perspective. The novel returns to the Great War to consider notions of ‘shell shock’, attitudes towards WWI veterans, and the problems surrounding remembering past violence, but what is perhaps surprising about Another World is that it uses a Victorian storyline to address these concerns, and presents the First World War through the means of references to nineteenth-century culture.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 73-89
Author(s):  
Marjana Bajdak

Images of Life and Death in Women’s Discourse on the Great War (Based on Materials from Eastern Galicia)´The First World War changed the relatively stable and comprehensible life of women in Eastern Galicia. It made everyone ponder over the concepts of life and death. Women hardly thought about life in the war in philosophical categories. For them it was an everyday struggle. ´The war manifested the contrast of life and death, and at the same time, immediately led the women to assert that the boundary between being and non-existence was too blurry, almost unreal, and could be crossed at any moment. The fear of death was usually greater when women obtained higher education and their living conditions were better, and the attitude to death depended on what place it occupied in the system of values of the whole society, as well as that of the individual, and on women’s subjective perception of the phenomenon of death. Life became more valuable at the end of the war.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor Downing

This article considers the making of the BBC2 series, The Great War, and examines issues around the treatment and presentation of the First World War on television, the reception of the series in 1964 and its impact on the making of television history over the last fifty years. The Great War combined archive film with interviews from front-line soldiers, nurses and war workers, giving a totally new feel to the depiction of history on television. Many aspects of The Great War were controversial and raised intense debate at the time and have continued to do so ever since.


Balcanica ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 107-133
Author(s):  
Dimitrije Djordjevic

This paper discusses the occupation of Serbia during the First World War by Austro-Hungarian forces. The first partial occupation was short-lived as the Serbian army repelled the aggressors after the Battle of Kolubara in late 1914, but the second one lasted from fall 1915 until the end of the Great War. The Austro-Hungarian occupation zone in Serbia covered the largest share of Serbia?s territory and it was organised in the shape of the Military Governorate on the pattern of Austro-Hungarian occupation of part of Poland. The invaders did not reach a clear decision as to what to do with Serbian territory in post-war period and that gave rise to considerable frictions between Austro-Hungarian and German interests in the Balkans, then between Austrian and Hungarian interests and, finally, between military and civilian authorities within Military Governorate. Throughout the occupation Serbia was exposed to ruthless economic exploitation and her population suffered much both from devastation and from large-scale repression (including deportations, internments and denationalisation) on the part of the occupation regime.


Balcanica ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 357-390
Author(s):  
Milovan Pisarri

Since sufferings of civilian populations during the First World War in Europe, especially war crimes perpetrated against civilians, have - unlike the political and military history of the Great War - only recently become an object of scholarly interest, there still are considerable gaps in our knowledge, the Balkans being a salient example. Therefore, suggesting a methodology that involves a comparative approach, the use of all available sources, cooperation among scholars from different countries and attention to the historical background, the paper seeks to open some questions and start filling lacunae in our knowledge of the war crimes perpetrated against Serb civilians as part of the policy of Bulgarization in the portions of Serbia under Bulgarian military occupation.


Author(s):  
Gemma Moss

Women exerted a considerable influence on Maurice, even though admirable female characters are absent from the narrative. Before the First World War, a sexually conservative reform movement called Social Purity was bringing male sexuality under particular scrutiny, making this a difficult time for Forster to be claiming that homosexuality was not morally wrong. Interpreted against this background, Maurice can be read not as a rebellion against attenuated Victorian attitudes or against women but as a challenge to the contemporary social purity movement. In this context – the difficulty of talking about homosexuality, of which the novel explores the effects – the willingness of Forster’s friend and confidante, Florence Barger, to discuss homosexuality also needs to be seen as significant. She contributed to Forster’s ability to represent homosexuality as a valid alternative to bourgeois masculinity that equated heterosexuality with morality, health and economic success.


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