Impact of WW1

( towards Modernism)
Week 2
LIT314
The First World War
• 28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918.
• Division of the world due to formation of two alliances:
- Allied Powers (Great Britain, France, Russia and later USA, Japan, Italy)
- Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey).
• Modern technology, culture, fashion: fight for independence,
resources, navy, military power flaunting.
 Impact on life
• Casualties: More than 9 million soldiers and 5 million civilians.
• Entire generation of young men were wiped away; 15:1
(female, male ratio).
• Excessive loss of man-power.
• Hunger and disease: typhoid, malaria, diarrhea, yellow fever,
pneumonia, influenza.
• Amenities were saved for the war.
• Developments in medical science, warfare, politics, social
attitudes.
• Change in social life; women worked jobs.
Impact on Literature
• Emergence of war literature and poetry.
• Publishing were mostly war-related works.
• Literature served to reflect the horrors of war.
• The Waste Land by TS Eliot.
• Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg.
• Focus shifted from entertainment to awareness.
• Tone shift: suffering, pain, disillusionment, hopelessness.
Modern Philosophers
• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
• “Nietzsche is arguably most famous for his criticisms of traditional
European moral commitments, together with their foundations in
Christianity. This critique is very wide-ranging; it aims to undermine
not just religious faith or philosophical moral theory” (Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2022).
• “he launches the famous, aggressive and paradoxical pronouncement
that “God is dead” (GS 108, 125, 343).” 
• “Christianity no longer commands society-wide cultural allegiance as
a framework grounding ethical commitments, and thus, a common
basis for collective life that was supposed to have been immutable and
invulnerable has turned out to be not only less stable than we assumed,
but incomprehensibly mortal—and in fact, already lost” (Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2022).
Sigmund Freud
• Psychoanalysis: Investigating the interaction of the conscious and
unconscious elements in the mind.
• “All of Freud’s work depends upon the notion of the unconscious,
which is the part of the mind beyond consciousness which
nevertheless has strong influence upon our action.”
• “Later in his career Freud suggested a three-part, rather than a two-
part, model of the psyche, dividing it into the ego, the super-ego and
the id, these three levels of the personality roughly corresponding to,
respectively, the consciousness, the conscience, and the unconscious”
(Barry, P, 2008, p. 96-97).
Existentialism
• “European philosophy distinguished by its emphasis on lived human
existence.”
• “In terms of its literary impact, the thought of Sartre has been the most
significant.”
• “Sartrean existentialism, as distinct from the Christian existentialism derived
from Keirkegaard, is an atheist philosophy of human freedom conceived in
terms of individual responsibility and authenticity. Its fundamental premise,
that ‘existence precedes essence’, implies that we as human beings have no
given essence or nature but must forge our own values and meanings in an
inherently meaningless or absurd world of existence” (Baldick, 2004, p. 89)
• Albert Camus
Nihilism
• According to Nietzsche it is “the belief that all values are baseless and
that nothing can be known or communicated.”
• Existence is without meaning or purpose.
• Create your own values and meaning in life.
• The Gay Science, The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Reference
• Butler, C. (2010). Modernism: a very short introduction. OUP Oxford.
• Eksteins, M. (2000). Rites of spring: The Great War and the birth of
the modern age. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
• Stringer, J. (Ed.). (1996). The Oxford companion to twentieth-century
literature in English. Oxford University Press, USA
Thank you, questions?
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlNFVblfDLo – The economics of
WW1.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLpYVTRVs_s – 50 insane world
war 1 facts…