PS-Surveying English Literatures: The Beauty of Survival: Writing the Second World War
Andrew James Johnston
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As the generation which actively took part in the Second World War has all but died out, that most terrible of military conflicts is being subjected to ever-increasing scrutiny. For the British especially, the memory of the Second World War is fraught with ambivalence. On the one hand, it conjures up images of “their finest hour” (Winston Churchill, June 18th 1940), on the other, its glories are tarnished by the supposedly shameful appeasement policies that led up to it, by the Allies’ relative inaction in the face of the Holocaust and by the systematic strategic bombing of Germany, directed primarily against the civilian population. Besides, the war crucially accelerated the decline of Britain as an empire.
Yet it is precisely this ambivalence that provides the basis for complex literary attempts to re-fashion and interrogate the memory of the war. Thus, in literature written in English, the Second World War has become something of a perfect narrative theatre in which to stage issues of history and memory, identity and experience, story-telling and myth-making, and to cast these issues in terms of perspectives depending on the frequently conflicting dynamics of class, nation and gender.
This course will seek to trace some of these narrative trajectories in the novels The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje, 1992) and Atonement (Ian McEwan, 2001). Students are presumed to have acquired copies of these novels and to have read them before the course starts. They will be given the opportunity to prove their familiarity with the texts in a series of short tests.
16 Class schedule
Regular appointments