Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: World War One : Memory and Modernism

The remembrance of World War One was being planned from the earliest days of combat: writers, officials, civilians and combatants meditated on its legacy throughout the conflict. Laurence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen,” a cornerstone of postwar commemorative efforts, was written in September 1914, and plans were in place for cemeteries, memorials, and remembrance rituals long before the guns went quiet. This talk will explore the controversies and innovations in forms of commemoration in British, French and American contexts, from debates over where to bury the dead, how to name them, and how to acknowledge the diversity of religious beliefs within a global fighting force. Debates also raged between those who advocated practical memorials (schools, hospitals, and other municipal improvement projects named in honor of the dead) and those who wanted monuments dedicated solely to the dead that could be a focus for mourning. The enormity of the conflict demanded new forms of literary response, but many writers—especially poets and memoirists—felt considerable pressure to honor the dead in their work. This talk will also examine the ways in which postwar writers were torn between mourning and modernism.

Joanna Scutts (Shoichi Noma Reading Room) is a literary critic whose essays and book reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Nation, and The New Yorker online.  She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where her research focused on the literary and commemorative aftermath of World War One.  She is currently at work on her first book, a cultural history of single women, self help and New York City in the 1930s.

This lecture is in conjunction with the exhibit Over Here : WWI and the Fight for the American Mind - Now through February 15