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Deeply inscribed into British (and other cultures’) cultural memory, WWI and WWII have featured strongly in British fiction and film in the last 30 years. In this seminar, we will discuss a number of fictional and filmic representations of these two major military conflicts of the twentieth century. With Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration (1991) and Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), we will focus on contemporary (re)constructions of WWI. With Sarah Waters’s novel The Night Watch (2006), A.L. Kennedy’s novel Day (2007), and Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk (2017), we will explore different, and indeed diverging, stories of WWII told at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Throughout the seminar, we will be concerned with how these different texts negotiate questions of history, heroism, and trauma; and we will discuss to what extent these texts are engaged with (de)constructing powerful myths of Britain/Britishness.
Students MUST use the set texts in the following editions:
Barker, Pat. Regeneration. 1991. London: Penguin, 2008. ISBN: 978-0141030937.
Waters, Sarah. The Night Watch. London: Virago, 2006. ISBN: 978-1844082414.
Kennedy, A.L. Day. 2007. London: Vintage, 2008. ISBN: 978-0307386311. |
