English Literature Suggested Reading 2

Key moments in 20th century history World War One (1914‐1918) When a young Bosnian Serb assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on the 28th June 1914, he set off a chain of events that would ultimately result in the outbreak of World War One, a war that grew to involve thirty‐two countries across the globe. By its end, over 17 million soldiers and civilians had died, and the nature of war itself had been transformed by the advent of modern weaponry and military technology. The brutality and scale of the conflict was rendered most famously in the poetry produced during and after the war, but writers continued to be fascinated and horrified by its aftermath throughout the 1920s. The disjunction between actual reality and the high ideals propounded by propagandists of the time was itself part of a wider crisis in meaning and representation that animated much Modernist writing, including T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. While the modernist movement had begun prior to the war, the conflict’s vast scale, brutality, and costs fascinated many artists and writers. The war definitively ended many social and cultural traditions that survived the nineteenth century and made clear the modern, mechanised world we were entering, a world where the older expressive forms and techniques no longer seemed adequate, appropriate, or compelling. Paul Nash, The Menin Road, 1919, oil on canvas, 182.8 x 317.5 cm (Imperial War Museum, London) Extract from The Waste Land (1922) by T.S. Eliot What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Key moments in 20th century history The Russian Revolution (1917) When delegates to the Second Congress of Soviets stepped outside in the early morning of the 26th October 1917, they witnessed the first day of a workers’ government, in the world’s first workers’ state. The Russian revolution, perhaps more than any other event in the 20th century, radically divides opinion. Did it offer a glimpse of a different world, a world of justice and freedom? Or was it merely the beginning of one of the darkest, bloodiest, and most violent regimes in human history? The violent rupture of the revolution, for good or ill, reverberated across Europe and the world, and indelibly marked literature from 1917 and beyond. Certainly, the tragic degeneration of the revolution into the terrifying totalitarianism of Stalinism served to inspire George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. But the revolution also served, for a time, to suggest a new kind of art was both possible and necessary. Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring (1921) was praised, in a review by T.S. Eliot, for its ability to “transform the music of the steppes [flat, unforested grassland] into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these despairing noises into music”. Artistic experimentation and diversity were hallmarks of the years immediately after the revolution, and this mood of experimentation and desire to produce a modern means of artistic expression influenced writers like Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and, later, Auden and Orwell. Questions about the relationship between literature and politics were especially acute in this period, as was the extent to which art should itself have a clear political commitment. Whether in the current trend for dystopian visions of the future, or recent films like I, Daniel Blake that seek to challenge social and economic injustice, one hundred years later its influence remains. El Lissitzky Red Wedge, 1919 Extract from Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell But they woke at dawn as usual, and suddenly remembering the glorious thing that had happened, they all raced out into the pasture together. A little way down the pasture there was a knoll that commanded a view of most of the farm. The animals rushed to the top of it and gazed round them in the clear morning light. Yes, it was theirs‐‐everything that they could see was theirs! In the ecstasy of that thought they gambolled round and round, they hurled themselves into the air in great leaps of excitement. They rolled in the dew, they cropped mouthfuls of the sweet summer grass, they kicked up clods of the black earth and snuffed its rich scent. Then they made a tour of inspection of the whole farm and surveyed with 2 speechless admiration the ploughland, the hayfield, the orchard, the pool, the spinney. It was as though they had never seen these things before, and even now they could hardly believe that it was all their own. 3 Key moments in 20th century history World War Two and the Holocaust (1939‐1945) “Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.” Primo Levi, in If This Is a Man, his account of his time as a prisoner in Auschwitz Estimates vary, but the total loss of life as a result of the Second World War was between 60 and 80 million people. It is the deadliest military conflict in human history. Western science, technology, and industry were all employed with devastating success to waging ‘total’ war, a conflict that affected nearly every continent and its peoples. Humanity’s capacity for evil raised profound moral, social and spiritual questions ‐ what of the passive immorality of people and nations which could not be prosecuted, that vastly greater number who knew (or should have known), who stood by and who did nothing while wartime genocide and atrocities were committed? If World War One produced a crisis in meaning and representation, the Second World War suggested a universe that was senseless, useless and absurd. What of truth, value and meaning when there were deliberate genocide campaigns, systematically enacted with technologically‐ assisted success? Art and literature were never the same again, and the end of the war is viewed by some academics as the beginning of the period known as postmodernity. William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies (1954) examines the darkest elements of human nature – schoolboys are cast away on a Pacific island during a nuclear war, re‐enacting humanity’s fall from grace as their relationships degenerate from innocent camaraderie to totalitarian butchery. Other novels, such as Albert Camus' The Plague (1947), question the possibility of human progress and the horror of self‐seeking materialism that prefigures the advent of consumerism. Artistic responses to the horrors of the Holocaust continue to be produced, from the graphic novel Maus (1980‐1991) which examines the genocide through allegory, memoir, biography and history, to films like Son of Saul (2015), which uses a highly distinct cinematic language to depict a Jewish prisoner forced to work in the gas chambers. When the cultural critic Theodor Adorno wrote that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, he meant not to silence poets and writers, but to recognise that the Holocaust was unspeakable – how can literature be possible in such a world? All literature thereafter, consciously or not, is engaged with this question. Extract from The Plague (1947) by Albert Camus None the less, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers. And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen‐chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that 4 perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city. Key moments in 20th century history Vietnam War (1954‐1975) Opposition to America’s extensive military intervention in Vietnam, an intervention that intensified over the course of the 1960s, served as a lightning rod for wider social concerns about economic and social justice. This aggregate movement encompassed opposition to traditional modes of authority and a desire to challenge the social, cultural and sexual attitudes of the time.

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