Echoes of Violence: Past and Present Perspectives of World War One in Literature Echos de la violence : Perspectives passées et présentes sur la Première Guerre mondiale dans la littérature En Fr

Résumé En

Somme. Verdun. Ypres. These names remain in the collective European memory, evoking images of violence, eerie battlefields and disfigured corpses. Although most of us today didn’t fight in the First World War, we are all too familiar with the wretchedness of the trenches or the nauseating smell of decaying bodies.Published in March 2023, Alice Winn’s novel “In Memoriam” recovers these images of violence through the eyes of Gaunt and Ellwood, who follow in the path of millions of other English boys as they enlist for the Great War. Though fictional, they are enveloped in very real destinies: From an “exhausting, but rather idyllic” period of training, they run enthusiastically into their first battle (and away from their own consuming feelings for one another), before ultimately being faced with horrors beyond comprehension: “I wish I could be more articulate”, writes Gaunt in a letter to Ellwood, “but the English language fails me”.However, the English language does not fail Winn. Adopting brutal, clinical descriptions of the battlefield from memoirs such as Ernst Jünger’s “Storms of Steel” or Robert Graves’ “Goodbye To All That”, Winn combines the expressionistic language of 20th century memoirs with a modern reflection on violence, as Ellwood and Gaunt navigate not only the inhumanity of war, but also an illegal love story, almost as deadly as the battle itself.As such, I will be addressing the following questions in my presentation: How are images of war violence perpetuated through literary works? Does literature define the way we understand and relate to war? What experiences of violence, formerly censored, can literature explore today? Through Winn’s newly published novel I plan on looking at the cultural impact of descriptions of violence in order to show how literary language can preserve and perpetuate memories of conflict, battle and suffering.