Kate McLoughlin

Dispute Incarnate: Philip Roth's Operation Shylock, the Demjanjuk Trial, and Eyewitness Testimony

McLoughlin argues that in Operation Shylock Roth distorts the Demjanjuk trial to focus maximum attention on the eyewitness testimony of a Treblinka survivor who had previously claimed that Ivan the Terrible was killed but who now identifies him as Demjanjuk. In spotlighting this logical impossibility, Roth suggests an aesthetic and an ethos for representing the Holocaust.

Glamour goes to war: Lee Miller's writings for British Vogue, 193945

Abstract World War II intensified three overlapping visual experiences for women: seen (those who were the news), seeing (those who brought the news) and unseen (those who remained, because they were unrecorded or camouflaged, invisible). Most British women were unseen. Lee Miller, wartime correspondent for British Vogue, occupied all three positions in the war years. Reading her dispatches from Europe for British Vogue from 1939 to 1945, this article assesses Miller as a writer. Her writings help to define her as both an image and an image-maker: her language provides a more nuanced account of her sense of seeing, being seen and not being seen than is possible in a photograph. At the same time, the fact that she was a professional photographer brings a greater depth to her understanding of visuality. A mix of glamour and invisibility emerges from her texts. In the war zone, soldiers both celebrated Millers presence and looked straight through her. The dichotomy of being seen and not being seen which recapitulates the Vogue double-bind of both glamorizing and concealing women is further complicated by another contrast: being seen and seeing. The article argues that Miller personified the exceptional observer, the unique female presence who operated in a way so similar to the military forces that she became assimilated with them, both onlooker and participant.

The First World War: British writing

Soldiers and civilians In May 1917, Virginia Woolf published a review in the Times Literary Supplement of The Old Huntsman , Siegfried Sassoons first collection of war poems. Sassoon was to become one of the most famous of the British First World War poets, and Woolf was among the first to recognize the importance of his work. No other poet, she writes, has managed to convey so strongly what is “sordid and horrible” about the war. Many others are writing about the conflict, but Sassoon produces “a new shock of surprise” in his readers. “Yes,” writes Woolf, we find ourselves saying, “this is going on; and we are sitting here watching it.” She describes the “loathing” and “hatred” at work in Sassoons poetry (a quality some readers at the time and since have criticized as too obvious) and speculates that it shocks readers into thinking about their role as spectators to the sufferings of war, producing “an uneasy desire to leave our place in the audience.” In this, Sassoons poetry is “realism of the right, of the poetic kind.” Woolfs modest article shrewdly notes two areas that are crucial to an understanding of British writings of the First World War (1914-18). Firstly, it was in literature that readers at the time could learn something of what was really happening (“this is going on”).

Muddy Poetics: First World War poems by Helen Saunders and Mary Borden

Abstract In its appearances in English literary history, mud is associated with dirt and disgustingness, but also with vitality, insurgence and creativity. Mud in First World War poetry, however, has been most often read as figuring ontological and epistemological crisis: the taboo and the abject. Two poems about mud written by women during the First World War permit a different interpretation. In Helen Saunders’ ‘A Vision of Mud’ (1915) and Mary Bordens ‘The Song of the Mud’ (1917), mud is as fascinating as it is repellent. Blurring the boundaries between combatant and non-combatant, it serves as the inspiration for and the stuff of female creativity. It also reveals the possibilities of a critical thinking with muddiness which productively resists reductive dichotomies.

Missing letters: reading the interstices in archival correspondence from the Napoleonic Wars and in Thomas Hardy's The Trumpet-Major

An epistolary cache held in Londons National Army Museum is notable for letters which are expected but not written. Lieutenant Edward Teasdale, deployed to Jamaica in 1807 as part of the British forces fighting the French in the Napoleonic Wars, wrote home repeatedly to his mother in Yorkshire, pleading with her to correspond with him. But he only ever received one letter from her. The lack of letters nonetheless produces a palpable sense of desire, hope and expectation. The same phenomenon is also evident in Thomas Hardys novel The Trumpet-Major, published in 1880 but set during the Napoleonic Wars. Reading the interstices – the places where letters should be but fail to be – reveals the importance of ‘phantom-narratives’ in life writing and war writing. Phantom-narratives not only reveal otherwise unarticulated hopes and desires but also vary the epistemological texture of the novel.

American writing of the wars in Korea and Vietnam

Korea as a rehearsal for Vietnam Although different in important respects, the wars in Korea (1950-53) and Vietnam (1965-73) had much in common. Both were Cold-War conflicts conceived as limited, non-nuclear wars to halt the spread of communism, and both resulted in heavy losses: in Korea, some 36,000 US troops died; in Vietnam, 58,000. Other parallels extend beyond these statistics: before the wars began, both Korea and Vietnam, through international agreement, had been partitioned into a communist north and a US client-based south, making both countries potentially combustible. The outcome of the two conflicts was the opposite of what America and its allies intended: at the time of writing (2008), North Korea remains a nuclear-armed communist state ruled by a despot, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam continues to be a united communist nation whose relations with the USA were normalized only in 1995. In both wars, the USA was taught a traumatic lesson in the new realities of warfare as its advanced technology proved insufficient to achieve victory in either the cold, mountainous terrain of Korea or the paddy fields and jungles of Vietnam. US military theorists remained fixated on conventional war as fought on the battlefields of Europe, and its politicians too often ignored low troop morale and motivation. In these two remote Asian wars, the American public, after an initial period of enthusiasm, soon grew disillusioned, and US soldiers found it increasingly difficult to believe in the causes they were supposedly fighting for.

American Revolutionary War writing

It can be easy to forget that the American Revolution included a long and difficult armed conflict. Scholars of the period, in both historical and literary studies, have focused almost entirely on the ideas that drove the American colonists to resist British imperial rule and underpinned the new form of government they adopted in that process, the so-called experiment in democracy. The contrast to the historical memory of the American Civil War is instructive. The symbols and images of the Civil War are for the most part specifically related to the bloodshed of war: battlefields such as Gettysburg and Petersburg and events such as the burning of Atlanta and Richmond have become the enduring emblems of the conflict that divided the states. Although battlefields are not entirely absent from the memorializing of the Revolution, the national imagination has been captured more by political sites such as Independence Hall, Mount Vernon, Monticello, and documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Moreover, images such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence (disseminated widely as a popular engraving), the Liberty Bell, and the Boston Tea Party focus attention on the political motivations for independence and push the war into the background, as if the war were incidental to the Revolution and not essential to its success. War, in other words, remains at the center of the cultural memory of the Civil War, whereas it has been pushed to the margins of the story of the American Revolution.

Early modern war writing and the British Civil Wars

Early modern war writing was neither transparent nor impartial, but in many ways a continuation off the field of the battles begun on it. Whether a professional soldier, gentlemen volunteer, or nobleman from the very elite of Europes aristocracy, an early modern war writer mustered whatever rhetorical muscle he could in order to shape his military memoirs, experiences of battle, or views on strategy into a persuasive whole. Demand for war writing grew throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and publishers increasingly cared more about the vividness of a report than they did about its accuracy. Eyewitness accounts were valued, but phrases about “the thundering shot of the canon [which] calleth me to my place” were no guarantee that the writer had actually been present at events. The newly founded grammar schools taught sixteenth-century schoolboys that powerful language was part and parcel of great military command: it enabled success on the battlefield by commanding respect and it gave the victor means to commemorate his victory and tactics. Julius Caesar was idolized as the greatest commander and orator of the ancient world, his Commentarii de bello gallico ( Commentaries on the Gallic War ) (58-52 BCE) becoming a fixture on the Elizabethan school curriculum. Admiration for Caesar and warrior-orators like him forms part of the cultural background to the warrior-heroes of Marlowes and Shakespeares 1590s drama - men like Tamburlaine and Henry V, who fought as eloquently as they spoke and whose eloquence was integral to their command. This chapter considers early modern war writing in two sections: the first focuses on the sixteenth century, the second on the British Civil Wars.

Voices of the Munich Pact

Munich, like Vietnam, is a metonym. If Vietnam is now shorthand for the misconceived cause, obdurately pursued to deadly effect, Munich has sustained for seventy years its meaning of shameful betrayal, weakness, and capitulation.1 In popular consciousness, Munich has visually endured as a text: the small sheet (sign of a signified, the graphemes of not keeping one’s word) waved by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at Heston airport on his return from the conference on 30 September 1938 (fig. 1).2 Later dismissed by Hitler as a ‘scrap of paper’,3 what Chamberlain held in his

When is authorial intention not authorial intention

This article uses the practice of the law of England and Wales to illuminate what is happening when literary theorists invoke authorial intention. We argue that in interpreting contracts, wills and statutes, judges employ the language of intention (what the contractor/testator/legislature ‘meant’) to inform their decisions, but that this linguistic usage is misleading. For in practice, judicial interpretation is firmly text-based. The language of intention remains solely to foster certain illusions about the ability freely to contract, bequeath possessions and enact legislation on a democratic basis. Applying this model to literary interpretation, we find a similar sleight-of-hand taking place. While theorists such as E. D. Hirsch and Stanley Fish promote authorial intention as the basis of interpretation, their actual practice is a matter of text-based hermeneutics.