Tag Archives: bridge to the blog

Sean’s Bridge to the Blog

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In class today we focused on Owen, specifically his use of the religious in “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young” and some of the formal elements in “Dulce et Decorum Est.” One thing that I wish we touched more on was Owen’s portrayal not only of war, but nationalism/the nation as an idea or concept.

I bring up this topic because in the famous final lines of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen does not make a statement about dying for your country in WWI specifically. Rather, his statement is more general, saying (translated) “It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.” If he wanted to, he could have expressed his frustration about WWI itself and the reasons why he saw this particular war as egregious (as he did in the “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”). However, by choosing not to do so, we can assume that Owen thinks it is never “sweet and honorable to die for one’s country,” no matter the circumstance. This, of course, goes against the prevailing narrative that dying in service of one’s country is the most honorable thing one can do (e.g. “The Charge of the Light Brigade”). If we assume that this is what Owen intended (and not that he used the lines just so that he could directly invoke Horace), the most obvious question is – why? If it was not because WWI was uniquely horrific, why does Owen have such a distaste for ever dying for one’s country? Or, as is certainly possible, am I reading too much into this? Is Owen’s reasoning tied only to the nature of WWI itself? Does he spend the majority of the poem describing, in nauseatingly vivid detail, the experience of a WWI soldier in the trenches because his opinion is only meant to be read as a response to WWI? Or, does he do so because he believes it to be the most way to get his message across?

I think a potential answer to these questions can be found in an Owen poem that we did not talk about in class today, “Smile, Smile, Smile.” To commit the heresy of paraphrase, the poem is about a group of soldiers reading an issue of an English newspaper and lamenting about all of the propaganda that it is spreading. One such piece of propaganda comes at the end of the quoted article, saying “‘The greatest glory will be theirs who fought, / Who kept this nation in integrity.'” (16-17). Immediately following this we read,

“Nation? – The half-limbed readers did not chafe / But smiled at one another curiously / Like secret men who know their secret safe. / (This is the thing they know and never speak, / That England one by one had fled to France, Not many elsewhere now, save under France.)” (18-23).

Here, it seems to me that Owen is suggesting that they (the soldiers) are England itself and that those at home have no right to speak of the “nation” of England because they are no longer a part of it. In some ways this seems compatible with sentiments such as Rupert Brooke’s “If I should die, think only this of me: That there is some corner of a foreign field / that is for ever England” (From “The Soldier,” 1-3). Yet, Owen’s sentiment is also vastly different. For Owen, the soldiers are not an extension of England, or fighting for England, they are England. Or, perhaps, there is no longer any England at all. Maybe England can only exist under the confines of France, because that is where the war is. To be honest, I’m not sure. The more I think about these lines the more interpretations I come up with. All of this is to say that Owen’s idea of the nation, especially when it is at war, is far from the convention at the time. And I think this view of the nation (whatever it is) can be used in order to read the ending of “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Perhaps Owen is so against dying for one’s country because his view of what a nation actually is has tainted his view of patriotism/nationalism. Does any of this make sense? What other readings can you come up with for these poems and their relation (or lack thereof) to each other? Did I miss Owen talking about nation in a different poem? Are there any other Owen poems that can be used in order to explain his supposed general distaste for dying for one’s country? Have his experiences in WWI changed his opinion on what it means to be a nation? Have I been thinking too much about the artificiality of the nation because of my postcolonial literature class? Hopefully some answers come as we stumble across this semester’s bleak ending.

Word Count: 800

Morgan’s (Second) Bridge to the Blog

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Today we talked in class a lot about the perspective of the speaker in Mary Borden’s collection of stories in “The Forbidden Zone”. I don’t want to talk much about this because we talked for a while in class about it and some other people (like Jordan in her post here and Jamie in her post here) have already extended this discussion onto the blog. I will, however, post the pictures of the drawings my section produced on the board today. I’m curious as it if there were any other perspectives that you saw the speaker holding in any of these stories that were different than the ones talked about in class. I personally saw the speaker as an onlooker or witness to the events, almost as a distant storyteller, which makes sense being as she is telling us these narratives in a very story-like way.

Picture by Sophia and Jonathan

Picture by Katelyn W. and Millie

One thing that really struck me as I read through the selection of work for today was the personification of things like the town and aeroplanes. The planes, in particular, caught my attention because they are the machines that are doing the destroying (unless you argue that man is the machine and the planes are just their way of executing but that is a whole other idea) but yet their characterization is almost childlike. They seemed like toys to me, in some really odd and warped way. What do you think this personification is doing in this work? What is the purpose of it? Did you even notice it while initially reading for today?

Another thing that I really liked when it came to Borden was her style. We talked a little bit about her sentence structure and what that was doing in the pieces, along with the repetition. Not to be repetitive, but I really loved the repeating. The four paragraphs that we read aloud in class today (pages 23 & 24) had a sort of systematic repetition happening there. In the first paragraph, in the first few sentences, one work from the first sentence would be repeated into the second, and from the second another word would find its way into the third and so on. This choice of subtle repeating seemed like it was trying to lull the reader or pull them through the paragraph. The lulling also happens towards the end of the first paragraph as sentences begin to establish a rhythm and rhyme to them. How do you see these poetic devices working in a non-fiction piece? Where there any other patterns that you noticed while reading? Or where there any other stylistic choices that Borden made that you think should be recognized here that we missed in class today?

I know some of these questions can be more analytical and maybe you need something easy to think about since we are just out of midterms week, so I will leave you all with this: out of all of the stories we read for today, which one was your favorite and why? Or, if you don’t want to be too specific, or don’t have a favorite, how do you feel about Borden in general? Do you enjoy this type of reading more or less than the novels and poems we have already tackled this semester?

 

Morgan’s Bridge to the Blog

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Hey guys! So today in class we spent a lot of time talking about the relationship between Catherine (Cat) and Frederic Henry’s relationship in the novel. We talked about the layers of their relationship, how they pretend that the hospital room and the hotel room is their own little house and even contemplated if their relationship was real or fake. Obviously, both Cat and Henry have some personal things going on and maybe that is why they are together, they could be a comfort for each other in some weird way. Being someone who has always been in love with the idea of being in love, I got really caught up in the romantic relationships we have seen so far this semester.

But how does the portrayal of love in “All Quiet,” “Not So Quiet,” and “A Farewell to Arms” do? How are they similar or different? Have we seen the type of relationship that Henry and Cat have before?

I think this all goes back to the glorification of wartime and the idea that everything works out in the end. It is the true romantic story: man goes off to war, gets injured, a pretty nurse takes care of him, nurses him back to health, they fall in love and get married, have a family and live happily ever after. Super sappy and in the end everything is wrapped up nicely with a pretty little bow and they live in a house with a white picket fence. It is like this was the dream of the time, the type of relationship people adored and wished themselves to be in. Pictures from this time and posters like that of which Dr. Scanlon showed us in class today add to this belief of the romanticized war.

However, we have already seen how Henry and Cat’s relationship deviates from this idea since she gets pregnant out of wedlock. Their mental states, their perspectives, and their actual relationship is everything outside of what the desired relationship was. So, could their relationship be here to mock this idea of romance during the wartime or is it an accurate depiction of two broken people finding relief and comfort within one another which makes life a little more bearable? And if so, what is trying to be shown here? Now, thinking back to our other books, how about the relationship Nellie finds herself in at the end of “Not So Quiet”? We discussed how she said she would never marry someone who was in the war and was injured because it would be a constant reminder of the things she witnessed, however, she gets engaged to Roy and accepts him even after his injury. Does this make their relationship the same as Henry and Cat’s? If so how? Do you think that these relationships that we see in these wartime stories are parodying the expectations that everyone believed would happen at the time, making fun of the dreams young women had of falling in love with brave soldiers, or do you think that they are just showing the actual “romance” that would come about during a time like this?

Word Count: 523

 

Olivia’s Bridge to the Blog

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So in class today we talked about a lot of interesting ideas and themes from the stories and poems we read. One area that interested me was our discussion was the Aldington story. I think we all found this story to be captivating, with the gothic elements Dr. Scanlon brought up, but also in the way it explores what we have all discussed wanting to see. We didn’t get to see Paul go home, or Nellie either. We leave them to their own ends. We don’t know if Paul would have become an anti-war activist, or if Nellie could have worked to recover from the shell the war condemned her to. In the Aldington piece we get to experience what it’s like for a soldier reintegrating into society. Hard, haunting work. Lieutenant Hall doesn’t get killed in battle, but the lack of post-war resources, the absolute misunderstanding of him and fellow soldiers by those back home, these are all effects of the war. We get our glimpse of a soldier returning home, but he is not quite able to escape the trauma and aftershocks the war. The war kills him just at killed Paul, and I can’t help but think at least Paul went in peace. Would Paul have experienced something similar to Hall if he had gone home? Would he have been able to reintegrate? Clearly some soldiers managed it despite the odds stacked heavily in their favor. Should reintegration even be the goal, if it will lead to more cases like Lieutenant Hall?

Another topic I wanted to bring up was one of the poems we read for last class but didn’t get to, “They”. I think it tied together well with our discussion of religion and religious critique evident through several of the works we’ve read, including Sassoon’s poetry. Reading this poem along with “The Redeemer” makes clear Sassoon’s critique of the use of religion and faith towards war propaganda. We have some truly fantastic, sarcastic lines in these poems that make that goal clear. We have the Bishop’s assurance, “their comrades’ blood has bought/ New right to breed an honourable race” ( Sassoon 4-5). After this assertion Sassoon goes on to say how one soldier has “lost his legs” another has “gone syphilitic” or “shot through the lungs” in the second stanza. This is hardly the heroic brave deaths soldiers were promised in the War Propaganda is they enlisted. What does Sassoon’s negation of the religious, patriotic war narrative do here? I think it attempts to embarrass folks like the Bishop, who explain away horrors with the simple, unsatisfying and rather patronizing line “‘The ways of God are strange!'” It also shows how Sassoon holds similar ideals to later modernists, as he questioned religious hegemony and absolute as they often did.

“They” was my favorite poem we read for this class so far, and I wonder if you guys agree with me, that it absolutely shredded the popular religious dogma and ideology at the time, the ideas we talked about today of divine right, and God being on the side of the British. If this poem was published during war time I would be shocked, it’s outright blasphemous…