Texte remanié de: Ph.D.--Amsterdam--University of Amsterdam, 1993. / Notes bibliogr. Index.

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Rhode Island, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 168-170).

The glory of war is dead, and the Great War killed it. Soldierly dignity, heroism, and proper field chivalry; all laid to waste by a single mortar round at Arras. This ethos—a vestige of Greek warrior worship—stood little chance against the trenches. It either drowned in the fecal trench muck at the Somme or staggered back—in tatters, if that—a broken soul; another victim of the so-called “Good Fight.” And there were many victims. An entire generation, even, lost to the trenches. But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that home front in England didn’t even get it.

This dissertation examines the modes of individual and cultural grieving that characterize the British literature of the Great War and its aftermath, 1914-30. Combining archival research, cultural history, and genre theory, I identify the war literature’s expression of a poetics of grief and grievance: one that is melancholic, in that it resists redemptive mourning, and accusatory, in that it frequently assigns blame for war and suffering on civilian spectators or the writer himself. In order to trace the development of the anti-elegiac in the literature of the Great War, my dissertation provides: (a) a publication history of the war poems of Wilfred Owen, (b) a comparison of the manipulation of the pathetic fallacy and pastoral mode in the works of combatant poets and Virginia Woolf, and (c) a detailed assessment of the reception of the controversial war memoirs and novels of the late 1920s. My findings challenge the widely held assumption that the pervasive irony and disenchantment of the literature of the Great War is primarily a product of the historical rupture of the event. I emphasize that the ironic mode developed during the war- and inter-war periods is an expression of personal and social anxiety attached by writers to the subject of individual mortality. Additionally, I argue that the literature of the Great War focuses on the limits of language that addresses atrocity, and the instability of the idea of consolation in an era of mass, industrialized death. / text

published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Architecture

Thesis (S.B. in Literature)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. / Introduction: The infantrymen of the Great War experienced the unimaginable. Soldiers in the trenches internalized images of confusion and gore, and returned to a society unwilling and often unable to comprehend their sacrifices. For nearly 65,000 of these soldiers, their experiences on the front brought on hysteria, mental breakdown, muteness, paralysis, and other bizarre physical maladies (ER, 189). The medical description of the mental conditions that precipitated so many of these symptoms underwent a dramatic evolution as more and more cases were reported. These conditions were first collected under the terse assignation of "shell-shock," linking the range of maladies to the psychological influence of heavy artillery as well as referring tacitly to ontological theories of physical lesions in cerebral tissue. Such diagnostic projections were assisted by patients who, upon solicitation, readily supplied anecdotal evidence of mortar blasts. As the war progressed, however, the appearance of cases not directly linked to close-proximity explosions prompted the search for a non-physical term; "neuroses" was put into use, and an epistemological link to madness was established. Finally, in the search for a more scientific label, physicians decided upon "neurasthenia," a psychiatric condition linked to exhaustion and memory loss. These three terms - shell-shock, neurasthenia, and neuroses - were used interchangeably in public, political, and military discourse throughout the war, but most of the physicians who worked in Great Britain's mental wards were less careless. Each term bore a distinct epistemological weight: shell-shock clearly implied both physical causality and temporariness, neurasthenia referred to a specific mental condition, and neuroses hinted at a psychological disease "entity." Every subsequent war since the medical "discovery" of shell-shock has occasioned another evolution in terminology, and each new term has since fought to position its particular insight alongside an epistemological backlog that accrued new facets more often than it changed form in totality. Disassembling such networks of discourse thus requires historicizing conflicting definitions. The theories of psychoanalysis put forth by Sigmund Freud loomed large for many of the figures in these debates, both as an inspiration for cerebral therapeutics and as a challenge to the conventionalism and psychological materialism of the pre-war medical establishment. In subtly adapting Freud's insights, however, the practitioners of post-Freudian psychoanalysis pushed the official discourse on shell-shock in a different direction, leading to a more sophisticated understanding that was less accepting of paradigmatic and ideological identifications of Britishness with courage, character, and mental fortitude ... / by Thomas C. Schilling. / S.B.in Literature

Es planteja el caràcter bifront del gènere autobiogràfic. Siegfried Sassoon, poeta i combatent de la Primera Guerra Mundial, és l'autor de les memòries de George Sherston que narren la infantesa i joventut del protagonista en l'entorn rural idíl·lic del sud d'Anglaterra i, després, la seva participació al front occidental. Tanmateix, resulta difícil adscriure aquestes memòries a la ficció pel sol fet que els noms de l'autor i el narrador-protagonista no coincideixin. La trilogia autobiogràfica de Sherston narra amb precisió documental les vicissituds biogràfiques més rellevants de Sassoon. Ficció i autobiografia, història i memòria configuren alguns dels trets distintius d'una narració que explora i explota la hibridesa genèrica. / The dual nature of the autobiography genre is approached. Siegfried Sassoon, poet and combatant in the First World War, is the author of the memoirs of George Sherston, which narrate the childhood and youth of the protagonist in the idyllic rural environment of southern England followed by his participation on the Western Front. However, it is difficult to label these memoirs as fiction only because the names of the author and the narrator-protagonist are not the same. Sherston's autobiographical trilogy narrates with documentary accuracy the most relevant biographical vicissitudes of Sassoon. Fiction and autobiography, history and memory make up some of the distinctive traits of a narrative that explores and exploits the hybridism of the genre.

Prior study of Craiglockhart War Hospital has focused on the hospital's two most famous patients, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, along with the work of the psychotherapist W. H. R. Rivers. Craiglockhart's literary culture is studied in detail for the first time in this thesis and the hospital's therapeutic ethos used as a framework by which the creative work produced at the hospital can be examined. This thesis argues that the British Army's lack of consensus regarding the best treatment of war neuroses facilitated the development of Craiglockhart's expressive culture, in which patients were encouraged both to articulate their wartime memories and return to purposeful activity. The hospital's magazine, The Hydra, is examined at length; both in terms of its links to the wider genre of wartime soldier publications and as a telling document of the hospital's therapies in action. Owen and Sassoon's time at the hospital is also discussed, with particular emphasis on the hospital's central importance in Owen's poetic development and its troubling legacy in the post-war life of Sassoon. Finally, readers are introduced to George Henry Bonner, a patient of the hospital whose creative work is discussed here for the first time. This study makes clear the fact that, for the hospital's literary-minded patients, creative endeavour was an ideal means by which to negotiate the movement away from repression to the articulation of their wartime experiences.