War and the Fashioning of Gender

War and the Fashioning of Gender

ENG 210/GSS 350: War and the Fashioning of Gender

Oldman

Fall 2019

University of Miami

Choose one of the following topics for your second paper, 4 pages in length, double-spaced. Clarify and defend your insights using direct quotations from the text. The content of the argument, the style of the composition, and the use of standard grammar and spelling will be taken into account in the grading process. Please use one-inch margins and a reasonably sized font (10- or 12- point). Pages should be numbered and the paper should be titled.

1) Compare and contrast the representation of one of the following themes in two of the assigned World War I poems:

Early enthusiasm for the Great War sense of chivalric ideals of heroism vs. growing objection to mounting atrocities

Evidence of the industrial revolution–imagery of technological progress

The “alternative reality” of the trench and No-Man’s Land

Function of popular imagery rats, lice, flowers, birds

Sunrise/sunset as “fully freighted with implicit aesthetic and moral meaning”(Fussell, p.55)–appropriation of pastoral conventions

Endlessness of battle

Focus on particular body parts corporeal specificity

Layers of revolution/rebellion: Industrial Revolution WW1 itself Revolt against war’s violence

Dichotomizing–Us vs. them, demonizing of the enemy–“the drama of the binary” (Fussell, p.80).

2) Woolf considers Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith as doubles, a “study of insanity and suicide, the world seen by the sane and insane side by side,” despite the fact that they never directly meet. Clarissa learns about Septimus’s suicide from his psychiatrist, who is a guest at her party. In what ways, would you argue, do the two mirror one another? What is Woolf suggesting about the relationship between combatants/non-combatants in this representation?

3) We can consider Dadaism, and Surrealism which grew out of it, as responses to the barbarism and endlessness of World War I. Believing that the rational order of the world was destroyed by World War I, artists strove to achieve a “deliberate irrationality” which enabled them to overcome what they perceived as false dichotomies, such as dream and reality, conscious and unconscious, subjective and objective, masculine and feminine, and in doing so encompass a larger reality than mere “realism”.

In a free-style critique (the type of non-research-based response we did on our field trip to Lowe), analyze the surreal piece, or compare/contrast two surreal pieces, of your choice.

Suggested artists:

Marcel Duchamp

Rene Magritte

Giorgio de Chirico

Salvador Dali

Man Ray

Meret Oppenheim

Dorothea Tanning

4) In our examination of war and gender this semester, which has focused in particular on shell-shock as a challenge to stereotypically masculine gender expectations, the greater question of pro-war/anti-war belief has come up as a perpetual point of debate. That is, whether battle should be avoided under any circumstances (as per Cicero, “I prefer the most unfair peace to the most righteous war”) or whether–once peaceful means of settlement have broken down, such as conference and arbitration–war looms as an inevitable form of political problem-solving (like legendary Athenian orator Demosthenes, who preferred “an honorable war . . . to a disgraceful peace”).

Basing your response on personal experience, knowledge of current or past politics, literary representations, movies and other forms of visual representation, or discussions we’ve had in this class, weigh in on this controversial issue.

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