Literature of the First World War

Never such innocence, / Never before or since, / As changed itself to past / Without a word.’ Was Philip Larkin right to see the First World War as such a turning point in late modern history and literature? The aim of this course is to introduce students to a broad range of literature of the First World War from a variety of perspectives to comprehend this global crisis. We will study the political and social history of the war while encountering, through close readings, an array of writers trying to make sense of life in the trenches. The course offers an inventive and challenging approach to canonical English war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. However, we will also listen to the often ignored, anonymous voices of the common soldier and women on the home front, as well as foreign poets such as the French Guillaume Apollinaire, and the intense German Georg Trakl on the opposite side of no man’s land. A final objective is to encourage students to consider their own relation to the war by comparing later responses at the end of the twentieth century by such poets as Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.