BRITAIN IN THE CONTEXT OF TWENTIETH CENTURY CIVILIZATION

Whereas in the first semester we studied the forces engaged in the construction of the modern society
and man in one of Britain’s ages of splendor on the international stage, we shall now focus on the
demise of British grandeur in the context of twentieth century civilization shattered by two World Wars.
In connection with the wars, the accent will fall on the literary echoes of civilization finding itself “in
times of trouble”. In the lectures, a comparison will be made between the poems written from the
trenches (by soldiers, some of them who died on the battlefield) and the revolutionary mode of writing
that distinguished the great English modernist poets and novelists, who became leaders in the
international world of letters1: the poets William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot, the novelists Virginia Woolf
and James Joyce – and the playwright Samuel Beckett, Joyce’s disciple, who actually wrote literature
after the Second World War. In the first lectures, the direct and indirect references to the war in the
literature written in the first half of the twentieth century will be compared. The division of Europe and
of modern civilization as a result of the appearance of the first utopian socialist/communist/Bolshevik
state in Russia and the consequences of the expansion of the Russian Soviet State in the wake of the
Second World War will be analysed from the point of view of George Orwell’s famous dystopia Nineteen
Eighty-Four (written in 1949), which fictionally brings Russian totalitarianism to the heart of London.
After completing with last year’s Nobel Prize winner’s novel, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day,
the radiograph of international and local civilization’s decay understood from the point of view of old
style English meritocracy, the second semester’s lectures will dwell briefly on London as the hub of
British life and institutions. The last part of the second semester’s lecturing will be concerned Britain’s
mixed economy and its phases of development in the twentieth century, with Britain’s position and
connections with the overseas world in the wake of the demise of the British Empire – and, with the
Brexit issue.

The lecture and seminar bibliography:

Bibliography

McDowall: an Illustrated History of Britain – chapters 21 (The storm clouds of war), 22 and 23

Isaac and Monk – The Cambridge Illustrated Dictionary of British Heritage – entries to be indicated

The Norton Anthology of English Literature vol II – Voices from World War One (Rupert Brooke “The
Soldier” ; Siegfried Sassoon “Glory of Women”; Wilfred Owen” Dulce et Decorum Est”).

1
Since “ the world of letters” is a syntagm that evokes Carlyle’s man of letters and meritocratic desideratum, it is
important to note that, of the entire modernist generation, the only man of letters, in Carlyle’s sense, was T. S.
Eliot, an American intellectual who remained in Europe after coming with a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford.
The outbreak of the First World War (in American English, World War One) determined him to become established
in Britain. Eliot’s voice was both literarily and civically compelling, as a man of letters’ voice should be, and he
became more vocal after converting to Anglo-Catholicism (the new denomination which became widespread in the
wake of John Henry Newman’s conversion and his establishment at the Birmingham Oratory).
 W.B. Yeats: “The Second Coming”.

T. S. Eliot: “Gerontion”

Excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four

*Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day (optional)

LECTURE ONE

FACTS - Britain was displaced as the leading world power in the course of the twentieth century –
because Germany, which had risen as the second greatly industrialized nation of the West provoked the
First World War. Also, Britain gradually lost its colonies, the first of them being its Old World colony
Ireland. These circumstances are the occasion for going into military and political history, then social and
literary history – as sections of “British civilization” in the twentieth century.

The two power blocks that entered the First World War were, on the one hand, the Central Powers
(Germany, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires - old empires whose powers Germany had
rallied in order to oust the newer British Empire from power) and the Allies (or Triple Entente: the
French Republic, the British Empire and the Russian Empire; these powers were seconded by Italy, in
1915 and by Japan, Belgium, Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, Romania plus the Czech legions.) After two
years of pitched battle with volunteers, conscription became obligatory – conscientious objectors only
refused to go to war – the Great War, as the propaganda called it, ended. It had changed the face of the
world, granting power to women, who replaced men at home and who started to fight (literally!) for
emancipation (see the suffragettes’ pictures and explanations in McDowall, Chapt 22, pp 162-3).
Between 1906 and 1918 women were given the right to vote (ie, they were enfranchised) first in
Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland, then in Britain and in America. France, Spain, Belgium, Italy,
Romania and Yugoslavia did not join in this emancipation movement until after the Second World War
and Switzerland only enfranchised women in 1971. This increased the rate of divorce and made women
socially more visible and powerful.

Two more significant changes occurred at about the same time in Europe: the breakup of Southern
Ireland from the United Kingdom and the withdrawal of Russia from war, which led to the appearance of
the first people’s republic on the map of the world, the Soviet Republic. The details and effects of the
latter changes are instructive for understanding twentieth century social and political history. Soviet
Russia, which engulfed the former Tsarist, i.e., feudal empire, was to become in the course of the
twentieth century a communist backward tyranny, which drew its power from feudal economic, social
and political relationships – that conveyed poverty and blindfolded obedience to the Eastern half of
Europe after the Second World War.
 Because of Germany’s exclusion from the Peace and Treaty of Versailles, which left it out from the
international network of agreements – and free to pursue its ways, the Second World War broke out.
Germany became allied with Italy and Far East countries, such as Japan. Owing to the victory of the
Allies in the Second World War (thanks to America joining the Allies in 1942), at the Yalta Peace
Conference (and thanks to a secret agreement in Potsdam), the Russians were requited by being given
control over countries of Central and Middle Europe, to the east of the Iron Curtain. In the name of
triumphant socialism (which became a mere ideology at the time) , totalitarian terror, poverty and
backwardness separated the socialist republics which were under Russian rule ( in a European, Old
World empire of sorts) from the liberal, democratic and capitalistic west, a situation described in the
novel 1984, written in 1949 by George Orwell.

Three poems that illustrate the high-mimetic, the ironic and the low-mimetic views on war which
literature, when written in accordance with traditional literary standards, is likely to produce. From the
point of view of the revolutionary modernist writing recipes, these are examples of traditional literature,
written before the explosion of high modernist experiments/revolutionary literature changed “the face
of the world”.

HIGH-MIMETIC WAR POETRY

The Soldier  
by Rupert Brooke

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

TWO IRONICAL WAR POEMS (savage, hurtful, aggressive irony versus mild irony& light verse)

Glory of Women by Siegfried Sassoon

You love us when we're heroes, home on leave, 
Or wounded in a mentionable place. 
You worship decorations; you believe 
That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace. 
You make us shells. You listen with delight, 
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled. 
You crown our distant ardours while we fight, 
And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed. 
You can't believe that British troops 'retire' 
When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run, 
Trampling the terrible corpses--blind with blood. 
O German mother dreaming by the fire, 
While you are knitting socks to send your son 
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

Louse Hunting, Isaac Rosenberg

Nudes -- stark and glistening,

Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces
And raging limbs
Whirl over the floor one fire.
For a shirt verminously busy
Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths
Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice.
And soon the shirt was aflare
Over the candle he'd lit while we lay.

Then we all sprang up and stript

To hunt the verminous brood.
Soon like a demons' pantomine
The place was raging.
See the silhouettes agape,
See the glibbering shadows
Mixed with the battled arms on the wall.
See gargantuan hooked fingers
Pluck in supreme flesh
To smutch supreme littleness.
See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling
Because some wizard vermin
Charmed from the quiet this revel
When our ears were half lulled
By the dark music
Blown from Sleep's trumpet. 

A LOW MIMETIC, RATHER THAN IRONICAL, WAR POEM

DULCE ET DECORUM EST, Wilfred Owen

Thought to have been written between 8 October 1917  and March, 1918

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, 

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, 
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs 
And towards our distant rest began to trudge. 
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots 
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; 
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots  
Of tired, outstrippedFive-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling, 
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; 
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, 
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . . 
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, 
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. 
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, 
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. 
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace 
Behind the wagon that we flung him in, 
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, 
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; 
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood 
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, 
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud  
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, 
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest  
To children ardent for some desperate glory, 
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est 
Pro patria mori.