Its white Beaux-Arts colonnades which frame the plaza include the names of the First World War battles in which the American Expeditionary Force were engaged, now forgotten by most Americans: Cambrai, Argonne, Somme, Château-Thierry, Ypres, St Mihiel and Marne. In this way we seek to contribute to an ongoing conversation about American First World War cultural production, and a critical field that is very much still in the process of formation and consolidation.īeinecke Plaza, or Memorial Plaza, at the centre of the Yale University campus in New Haven, Connecticut, right next to the dining hall where students eat their meals, is hard to miss. Interdisciplinary readings allow the contributors to find generic tropes and connections across different media. Bringing together a range of scholars and drawing predominantly on literature and film by male and female non-combatants as well as participants, the case studies here consider American First World War novels, poetry, political papers, film, and screenplays. Instead it is usually focused through the ‘lost generation’ writers of the 1920s: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, et al. The Eurocentric focus of the key works of First World War cultural criticism – by Paul Fussell, Samuel Hynes, Modris Eksteins and Jay Winter – is perhaps due to what Hazel Hutchison notes as the strange place of the war in American cultural memory, as a war which ‘has never quite captured the public imagination’ ( The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War, 2015). Despite the many memorials and memory sites to American participation, and the impact of the recent centenary, public memory of the conflict in the US remains minimal, overshadowed by the Civil War on one side and the Second World War and the Vietnam War on the other. Together the articles seek to assess how we should characterize, theorize and categorize American First World War cultural production. This Special Issue of First World War Studies considers the specifically American literary and cultural production of the First World War and what distinguishes it from other national war literatures and cultures.
0 kommentar(er)
