The Four Winds and The Avant-Garde Apocalypse of War

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Whose War Was It Anyway? Some Australian Historians and the Great War

William Golding's first novel, Lord of the Flies, published in 1954,
 
 is still widely considered as his major work. It is one of the most widely-
 read, widely- admired, and widely- discussed novels in the last few
 decades. Throughout the novel, he shows a consistent struggle between
 good and evil; goes in parallel with his pessimistic view of human nature
 and his optimistic aspect represented in the characters of Ralph, Piggy
 and Simon. This thesis makes Lord of the Flies one of those novels which
 can be given several interpretations and be subject to controversial,
 critical and analytical approaches. Some perceive a bleak picture of
 humanity offered in Lord of the Flies when the symbol of reason and
 common sense is forced into an outlaw existence, and evil is chasing it.
 While others celebrate the shining hope of Ralph’s rescue and see the
 sacrifices as a homage good humanity pays for reaching to a more mature
 and higher state of being. What is so interesting in this novel is Golding's
 treatment of evil and his raising a subject of so much concern to the
 twentieth century people who have witnessed two horrible world wars.
 Such concerns were becoming the subject of critical controversies in
 popular and scholarly publications.
 
 The Struggle between Pessimism and Optimism in Lord of the Flies:
 Of the many great events of the 20th century, the two World
 
 Wars played a great and decisive role in forming new attitudes and
 opinions. William Golding was among the many writers whose lives were
 touched by the calamities and horrors of war, which left an unforgettable
 stamp on his literary career. The horrors of the World War 11 helped him
 to perceive some kind of innate human evil, like that explored in Lord of
 the Flies. Golding himself stated that "Lord of the Flies takes the
 supposed innocent experience of the island- like life in order to test it
 against the experience of Nazism and Second World War." 1 His work in
 the navy where he became a lieutenant and was placed in command of a
 rocket launching ship helped him to formulate this new vision about
 human nature. During that war, Golding learned how brutal people can be
 to one another, and witnessed all kinds of inhumanity and persecution

‘We are told [modernism] strives exclusively, excessively, toward motion’, Louise Hornby writes in Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film – ‘we see motion by not seeing clearly’ (pp. 190, 21). Hornby’s study into the very antitheses of modernism, principally the ideas of stillness, stagnancy and the fixed image, is predicated on this notion of flawed perception. Modernism, we are constantly reminded, is an aesthetic cultural mode in which motion, motility and speed inhere. Hornby’s refreshing study pulls the airbrakes on such preconceptions and, through attentive consideration of early photographic luminaries such as Anna Atkins and Julia Margaret Cameron, as well as a focused collection of literary sources from Marcel Proust to Virginia Woolf, argues that modernism is only ever as swift-moving as we allow it to be. It can be held fast, she suggests; it can be paused, rewound and scrutinized frame-by-frame. From the macro, fascistic ideals put forward in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909) to the nuanced narrative innovations of stream of consciousness, motion has defined how we read, write and think about modernism as a genre. The quick-fire relation of psychologies in Woolf’s prose, the frenetic polygons of the Cubists, the poster-ready platitude of ‘Make it New’, all point towards modernism’s ‘kinetic drive’, a truism across modernist texts both literary and visual that Hornby takes to task in this new publication (p. 1). She is interested in seeing stillness as a ‘formal polemic’, in probing further the immanent potentiality of photography to disrupt ideas of ‘technological determinism’ (pp. 3, 9). Whilst the rest of modernity appeared to rally against literary realism, their throttling towards progress buffeted by two world wars, Hornby privileges the figures and their mediums who brought such momentum to a halt, if but for a second, and let the light in.

Poems written during World Military I provide light on the conflict's psychological, emotional, and social effects by reflecting the close relationship between historical background and military themes. World War I, with its unprecedented use of mechanized combat and massive casualties, provided poets with a historical context that significantly impacted their portrayal of the conflict. As a result of the horrors of trench warfare, the loss of youth, and the doubting of nationalistic principles, writers such as Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen became increasingly skeptical and disillusioned with their earlier levels of patriotism. Topics covered include the emotional toll on soldiers, the brutality of battle, and the exaltation of sacrifice, all impacted by the historical context of the Great War. Poems serve as both memorials and critiques of the war experience, and this research emphasizes the significance of poetry in this process through textual analysis of essential poems. Thus, it sheds light on poetry's more significant cultural and historical role during World War I in influencing public recollection and comprehension of the conflict.

Reviewed by: Courage and Air Warfare: The Allied Aircrew Experience in the Second World War Robert J. Ursano Mark K. Wells. Courage and Air Warfare: The Allied Aircrew Experience in the Second World War. Cass Series: Studies in Air Power. London: Frank Cass, 1995. xiv + 240 pp. Ill. $40.00. Military psychiatry has a long history, perhaps most often dated from Salmon’s recommendations in World War I on how to treat combat casualties. Yet rarely has there been a description of the stresses and traumatic experiences facing [End Page 177] aircrews in times of war. The glory of flying is often what is heard, both from its participants and from those who write about the experience. Colonel Wells has added a substantive piece to the history of military warfare and, in particular, to the history of the combat environment in the air. Using historical documents, he writes about the stress, morale, and “moral fiber” of the U.S. Air Force in World War II. As a psychiatrist, I recognize accurate observation, meticulously sequenced in time and identifying patterns of concern. Those who define history in a similar way will find this volume to be a highly enjoyable and highly informative read. Courage and Air Warfare describes the process of aircrew selection and classification, and the impact of combat on fliers and their units. By late 1944, the School of Aviation Medicine of the U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF) had developed an intensive psychiatric evaluation, intended to identify the “robust” emotional constitution seen as necessary for success. The problem of establishing the validity of such screening was important and remains important now. Men who had hoped for years to become pilots were at times rejected seemingly arbitrarily—including one whom the astute reader will notice was a relative of the author. The management of emotional casualties has been of great concern to the armed forces. Even without attention to such casualties, other medical care teams are often overwhelmed. Wells accurately details that it was not just worry about personal death or injury that caused fear in airmen from both Air Forces (the Royal Air Force, Bomber Command, and U.S. 8th Air Force): they also feared for their friends, dreading having to deal with wounded and dying men on board their own aircraft, or with the results of aircraft accidents on take-off or landing. As the war endured, authorities and medical experts recognized that emotional breakdown could happen to anyone, not just “the weak” and predisposed. Yet despite this recognition, the continued bias against those who showed emotional breakdown extended for many years. Only in the early 1980s was the diagnosis “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” created by the American Psychiatric Association, and even then, much of the initial research was based on reevaluating and reinvestigating the relationship between the severity of traumatic exposure and the probability of breakdown. Our awareness of this most important lesson of combat and trauma is continually eroded by the social need to stigmatize and separate those who break down in order to reinforce the society’s sense of safety and feeling that “it could not be me.” Our military institutional memory must constantly be revived to assure that this lesson stays in the forefront of our thinking, for it is a major influence on training, leadership, and, of course, medical planning. Wells has made an outstanding contribution to the understanding of war and its effects on aircrews. Writing in an area in which little has been documented for the broad readership, including historians and medical scientists, he has presented in a well-written and systematic volume information from World War II that has not previously been pulled together in one place. His book is an excellent source for understanding the stress of air combat, developing an appreciation of the leadership needed in aircrews and air units, and understanding [End Page 178] how nations struggled with the horror of war and its effects on those who must fight in a combat that all saw as devastating, destructive, and necessary. Robert J. Ursano Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences Copyright © 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press

The paper aims to determine the artistic features of the short stories about the Great Patriotic War by the Yakut writer I. M. Sosin. The study analyses the themes and issues raised in the short stories, identifies the artistic features of the works. The writer’s short prose on the theme of war has not previously been the object of special analysis. At the same time, the theme of the Great Patriotic War occupies the main place in the writer’s creative work. This fact accounts for the scientific novelty of the paper. As a result, based on the analysis, the following has been found: the theme of the Great Patriotic War is explored through the lens of the writer’s own recollections and those of participants in the events of the war years (veterans and residents of the home front, children of war); the autobiographical nature, the author’s involvement in the events described, the essay character make the short stories especially sincere and realistic; the author employs various expressive means (similes, epithets, metaphors etc.) to describe the characters’ actions and express the author’s idea; the use of proverbs, toponyms deepens the ideological content of the works.

May 01 2008 Fontana's Atomic Age Abstraction: The Spatial Concepts and the Television Manifesto Jaleh Mansoor Jaleh Mansoor Jaleh Mansoor is currendy a Term Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is preparing a book manuscript entitled “Marshall Plan Modernism: The Monochrome as Matrix of Fifties Abstraction” that investigates die return of the monochrome, and attendant historical and political issues in abstraction, in postwar Italy and France. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Jaleh Mansoor Jaleh Mansoor is currendy a Term Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is preparing a book manuscript entitled “Marshall Plan Modernism: The Monochrome as Matrix of Fifties Abstraction” that investigates die return of the monochrome, and attendant historical and political issues in abstraction, in postwar Italy and France. Online Issn: 1536-013X Print Issn: 0162-2870 © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2008 October (2008) (124): 137–156. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo.2008.124.1.137 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Jaleh Mansoor; Fontana's Atomic Age Abstraction: The Spatial Concepts and the Television Manifesto. October 2008; (124): 137–156. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/octo.2008.124.1.137 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsOctober Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The article examines the little-known story of the Ukrainian writer and literary critic Denys Lukiyanovych (1873–1965) "My Son!" (1935). It was printed in its time only in the well-known literary and arts magazine Nazustrich (1934–1938). An attempt was made to characterize the ideological and thematic content and genre-stylistic specificity of the named work, thereby "writing" it into the history of Ukrainian literature of the 1920s–1930s. The relevance of the study is determined by the anti-war pathos of D. Lukiyanovych's story. Special attention is paid to the author's creation of a female image involved in the war events of 1914–1918, in particular, the so-called Great Retreat (June 27–September 14, 1915). As a result of this retreat, the operation of the troops of the Central Powers (Austria-Hungary, the German Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Bulgarian Empire) led to the crushing defeat of the Russian Empire and its withdrawal into the territory for several hundred kilometers. D. Lukiyanovych names specific villages of Lviv Oblast, Trostyanets and Stilsko, which were locally related to the mentioned events. The article points out the condensed content of the work, its plot-compositional features, and analyzes the system of images. It is proved that the author uses the strategy of synthesis of styles of the 20th century – from romantic and expressionistic tendencies, characteristic of the display of war, to naturalistic and impressionistic ones that "bare" the souls of the heroes. In the laconic format of the story, D. Lukiyanovych managed to create a monologue-recollection or rather a monologue-confession of the heroine, who, having lost her son, suffered more from the war than anyone else. The use of such a monologue narrative from the first person "intimates" what is written, and provides the effect of the presence of the recipient in the epicenter of events. The figure of the central heroine in her existential situation is the mouthpiece of the impoverished people and a symbol of their indomitability. The article characterizes the language features of the work (the peculiarity of word usage), the wealth of figurative techniques. It has been proven that the entire set of poetic techniques "works" in D. Lukiyanovych for the realization of the main idea, which consisted in condemning any war and expressing deep sorrow for human losses through the display of maternal grief. Of course, the story "My Son!" with its leading philosophical motif of life and death, life as a tragedy caused by war, is close to the works about the First World War by O. Kobylyanska, N. Kobrynska, O. Makovey, V. Stefanyk, Marko Cheremshyna, B. Lepkyi, I. Sinyuk, O. Turyanskyi, and many other artists. In conclusion, it was established that D. Lukiyanovych was able not only to depict the horrors of war but also to "immerse" his reader in the world of people who were destined to experience this horror. The original female image, written by the author in the story "My Son!", actually belongs to a number of iconic literary types associated with the war. Whereas the continuous semantic and emotional tension, specific stylistics allow us to call the analyzed story of D. Lukiyanovych dramatic. The research of other works of this author dedicated to the theme of man and war is promising. It would raise our understanding of the peculiarities of this particular artistic expression to a higher level. Key words: D. Lukiyanovych, the story "My Son!", the theme of war, the image of the mother, genre, style, modernity of writing.

Writing about World War I was a mass phenomenon in all the countries involved, leading to the emergence of the soldier-poet or the soldier-writer. The ‘discourse of testimony’ emerged during World War I as the immediate representation of historical experience by a simple person. This chapter focuses on the Greek soldier-writers (Theodoros Laskaridis and Stratis Myrivilis), who both fought on the Macedonian Front. They published testimonies about their experience of war in the newspapers where they worked as editors-in-chief or publishers almost immediately after their demobilisation. Their texts challenged the institutions that led to the war and the discourses of heroism, civilisation and liberation. The horror of war and the revolt of conscience are presented differently by each writer, depending on his political views. The angry realism of communist Laskaridis and his suicide embody the trauma of war and constitute him a soldier-writer par excellence. Myrivilis attempted to present the collective identities shaped by the war and to universalise the experience of the Macedonian front, leading to the successful reception of his work, Life in the Tomb.

The aim of the article is to analyze appeals to the experience of the First World War by Soviet publicists during the years of the new global conflict of 1939–1945. Methods used in the research: the method of content analysis, historical-genetic and historical-comparative. The main results. The article examines the transformations in the images of the First World War in Soviet journalism during 1939–1944 under the influence of the deployment of hostilities on the fronts of the Second World War, the defeats of the Red Army at the initial stage of the Soviet-German conflict, and the occupation of part of the territory of the USSR by Nazi Germany. The article highlights the phenomenon of «instrumentalization of historical memory», when during the Soviet-German war of 1941– 1945, the USSR constantly looked for historical analogies in the past, which would allow to effectively oppose the enemy at the present and attract additional internal and external resources to this opposition. Conclusions. At the end of the 1930s in Soviet society, it was possible to state a conscious “forgetting” of the history of the First World War. It was caused by the humiliation of the young Bolshevik state as a result of this conflict and the displacement of the tragedy of the First World War from the people’s memory by the intensity of the events of the Civil War and national liberation struggles. Soviet propaganda presented the First World War as imperialist. But 1939 and the unfolding of a new world massacre convinced Soviet publicists of the need to actualize the experience of the First World War in the social discourse in the context of receiving the “lessons of history”. However, while the USSR was counting on waging war exclusively based on its own resources, hoping for a victorious war. The defeats of the Red Army in 1941 brought a kind of “sobering”. In Soviet journalism, issues of partisan warfare, the fight against espionage, and the formation of consolidated military-political blocs are brought up to date. Subsequently, the experience of coordination of actions between the Allies of the Entente bloc during the First World War comes to the fore. This experience was supposed to serve as a certain argument to the countries of the Anti-Hitler coalition regarding the opening of a second front in Europe. Practical significance. The materials of the article can be used in the teaching of a course for students of the Faculty of History at the bachelor’s level by choice – “Military History of the 20th – 21st Centuries”. Originality. For the first time, attention is focused on the fact that the narratives of the First World War, despite the distancing of the Soviet leadership from this event in previous periods, played a certain mobilizing role, including at the international level in 1939–1945. Scientific novelty. For the first time, the problem of using the experience and discursive practices of the First World War in subsequent global conflicts is raised. Type of article: descriptive and analytical.

This chapter investigates the relationship between the legitimization of acts of aggression in wars and the outlawing of violence at home. It focuses on soldiers’ responses to violence during the transition from nineteenth‐century warfare to total war, which relied not only on mass conscription but also on the mobilization of civilians. In the ‘wars of the masses’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the Franco‐German War (1870–1) and the First World War (1914–18) – large numbers of individuals were required to kill on behalf of the state. For ‘more developed industrial states’, this was the point at which, as Norbert Elias recognized, ‘the gradient between pacification within the state and the threat between states is often especially steep’. Soldiers were thus caught between a taboo on aggression and killing in civilian life, and the encouragement and rewarding of violence during wartime. The article points to important similarities between combatants’ responses in 1870 and 1914 whilst also accepting that the inhibition of aggression had become more pronounced by 1914, despite more widespread expressions of national feeling, which served to legitimize the violent actions of conscript soldiers. At the same time, the reversal of civilized norms took place quickly during modern wars and with lasting effects during peacetime. Under certain conditions, acts of violence, the prohibition of which was supposedly necessary for the very existence of civilized societies, were rapidly accepted as a part of warfare and seem subsequently to have been accepted by sections of civil society.

Reviewed by: Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe ed. by Jason Crouthamel et al. Judith Szapor Jason Crouthamel, Michael Geheran, Tim Grady, Julia Barbara Köhne, eds., Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe. New York: Berghahn, 2019. 407 pp. In November 2014, at the start of a long line of scholarly events commemorating the centennial of the First World War, the Center for Jewish History in New York City hosted a conference; the resulting volume, World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (Oxford UP, 2017) was, as its editors, Jonathan Karp and Marsha L. Rozenblit stated, "one of the first academic works devoted expressly to the subject of World War I and the Jews." (17) Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion; Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe continues this exploration with a tighter scope but deeper reach. Three of the volume's four editors have contributed important monographs to the history of World War I in Germany, on topics ranging from the military, gender, and sexuality to memory and trauma, and the volume offers an even more wide-ranging survey of German Jewish war experiences. The four sections of the collection focus on Jews in the military, contested identities in the settings of front and home front, and two papers each on the representation of the war experience in film and literature and on postwar narratives, both in psychological discourse and nationalist war literature. Together, the articles offer an admirable range of disciplinary and methodological approaches with the aim of highlighting Jewish experiences and responses to anti-Semitism and introducing new sources that add nuance to Jewish and German narratives in an effort to inform but also reflect the subtle shifts in Jewish-German relationships. Any claim of a lack of studies centered on Jews and World War I should be understood in relative terms, in comparison to the still-growing scholarship on what came after—and what made most scholars see the First World [End Page 106] War as merely a prequel to—the Shoah. The significance of the war was never questioned by scholars or in popular memory; it was a paramount historical event that fundamentally affected the lives of European Jews and Jewish communities. Among the most significant of the often contradictory changes the war ushered in, it destroyed the empires the majority of Jews lived in but gave them, in the Balfour Declaration, the right to self-determination, at least in principle. Through military service and, for women, service on the home front, the war offered Jewish citizens the opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the state and earn full acceptance; at the same time, by displacement on a massive scale and rising anti-Semitism, it brought their identity and belonging into question. Scholarship from the 1960s until quite recently tended to approach German Jewish experiences during the First World War and in the postwar period with this hindsight understanding, and it described Jewish-German relations in the binaries of assimilation/anti-Semitism, exclusion/inclusion. Scholars highlighted the role of the 1916 Judenzählung initiated by the Prussian War Ministry as the decisive moment in the breakdown of these relations, leading to toxic anti-Semitism, and, eventually, the Holocaust. A stellar lineup of recent studies by, among others, Marsha Rozenblit, Derek Penslar, Tim Grady, and David Fine, presented a more nuanced, fluid, and complicated view of identity and Jewish experiences as well as Jewish and non-Jewish responses to and during the war, offering major corrections to this long-reigning narrative. The volume takes a firm position on the revisionist side of this debate, and most of the chapters argue that anti-Semitism was not the decisive factor in the everyday front and home front experience of German Jews. Anchoring the volume, Jason Crouthamel's chapter on Jewish and non-Jewish front soldiers supports this view by presenting their experience as a shared one and argues for an interpretation of the trends of wartime Jewish– non-Jewish relations within its own context—and with more emphasis on the testimonies...

Cultural and social historians of World War I have emphasized the central role African American troop experiences overseas played in changing definitions of African American manhood in the early twentieth century. However, despite the important role of the “Great War” in refashioning black American masculinity, very few current African American novelists have attempted to offer retrospective interpretations of this war's complex and tension-ridden significance for black male identity formation in the United States. This essay turns to popular fiction to discuss the brief World War I segment in Guy Johnson's <it>Standing at the Scratch Line</it> (1998). Taken as a whole, this action-adventure novel is often categorized as highly masculinist popular culture and entertainment. Yet, the book's short war segment—with its triad of a self-reliant working-class fighter, a Du Bois-inspired New Negro intellectual, and an innovative New Negro musician dedicated to his art—acknowledges the significant diversification of how African American manhood was lived and conceptualized during and after the war. The novel recognizes the connectedness of race, masculinity, the New Negro movement, and the ambivalences of US citizenship for African Americans in the World War I era and beyond. In so doing, it demonstrates that a historical awareness of World War I and its aftermath as a time period that witnessed a remarkable diversification of African American masculinities had, by the end of the twentieth century, become pervasive enough to find its way even to popular fiction.

The paper aims to look into the understanding of war in the context of Orthodox Christian culture, presented by emigrants who were forced to abandon Russia after the Great War and the revolutions and the Civil War that followed. The author compares the attitude to the war from two viewpoints: of N.A. Berdyayev, emigrant who had no combat experience, and A.A. Kersnovsky, emigrant who had field experience in war and philosophized about it. In their works they contemplate war through their existential situations, demonstrate personal paths of faith through the horrors of war, and construct the framework of interpretation of war for their emigrated compatriots. Reflecting on the war experience pushes N.A. Berdyayev and A.A. Kersnovsky to reconsider the essence of war by faith, which takes to the moral restoration, acceptance of guilt and claiming responsibility for the violence. The conclusion establishes that, in their interpretation, war does not present itself as essentially evil, it is rather a space for a man to act out their free will in its fullness, by serving their Christian duty in a righteous war.

The Mutability of Uniform