World War I and the Arts
FAIN: EH-50402-13
University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH 45220-2872)
Elizabeth B. Frierson (Project Director: March 2013 to April 2016)
A four-week institute for twenty-five college and university teachers to study the history of World War I from a transregional perspective.
This institute conceptualizes both WWI and the arts in a broader and more intricate frame than is the norm for scholars and popular perceptions: we will study the history of WWI from a transregional perspective on European, Russian, Ottoman, and American wartime experiences to move towards understanding the totality of this war as it was lived at the time. We define arts not only as literature, performance arts, soundscapes, texts, and visuals, but also as medical humanities, to understand how the wounded body and mind were treated by professionals and understood by laypersons struggling to reintegrate disabled soldiers and traumatized civilians into their societies and polities. The institute will challenge us to conceive of new ways to analyze and narrate WWI as a hinge point between old and new world orders as land-based empires fell, colonial empires cracked, and new nation-states were conceived in wartime and then built around the traumatized human survivors of WWI.
Associated Products
The First World War and the Myth of the Young Man's War in Western Europe (Article)Title: The First World War and the Myth of the Young Man's War in Western Europe
Author: Amanda Brian
Abstract: During and after the First World War, authors in several of the main belligerent nations presented the war as a young man’s war. The young man’s war proved to be a powerful trope, and a myth emerged about the typical trench soldier as handsome, white, and eighteen. In this article, I examine literature about the Great War across several nations – primarily Germany, Great Britain, and France – to demonstrate how and why youth became embedded in the collective memory and representation of the war. I argue, in part, that notions of youth in the early twentieth century allowed participating nations to emphasize innocence and tragedy, claiming the moral high ground in the process. As a result, it is now difficult to accurately depict the First World War soldiers as fathers as well as sons, husbands as well as fiance´s, men with careers as well as boys fresh from school. The generation of 1914 must be conceived more broadly, which would disallow easy teleologies to later tragic events in the 1930s.
Year: 2018
Primary URL:
http://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/yCmwpMK3tSHMufEyg4PH/fullFormat: Journal
Periodical Title: Literature & History
Publisher: Sage