Margaret R. Higonnet

Authenticity and Art in Trauma Narratives of World War I

Margaret R. Higonnet, Professor of English at the University of Connecticut and Affiliate at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, has edited Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of War (2001), and Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I (1999), an international anthology. She coedited Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (1987). Her articles on this period have focused on the intersection of gender with topics such as genre, race, audience, and liminality. Authenticity and Art in Trauma Narratives of World War I

SUICIDE: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE FEMININE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY*

Suicide, like woman and truth, is both fetish and taboo. A symbolic gesture, it is doubly so for women who inscribe on their own bodies cultural reflections and projections, affirmation and negation. In the nineteenth century, womens suicide becomes a cultural obsession. As Baudelaire suggests, the captain of this century bracketed by Goethes Werther and Durkheims Le Suicide is death. To take ones life is to force others to read ones death. For when

Bachelard and the Romantic Imagination

tion has long eluded students of his work. Because of his shifts in critical approach, a debate has arisen over what system, if any, governs his meditations on poetic imagery. The problem requires a comparative approach, since Bachelards work is rooted in the poetics and poetry of English and German Romanticism, a period for which he declared his affinity. The purpose of comparing Bachelards thought to that of his Romantic predecessors is not, however, to demonstrate his intellectual dependence. Many students of Bachelard have noted in passing his interest in writers like Novalis.1 Since none explores this interest in detail, it has not been recognized that his thought is closer to Romantic theories than to later aesthetic systems. The key point is that Bachelard turned to Romantic precedents not only for isolated ideas but also for his most characteristic and problematic critical procedures: his reliance on metaphoric associations, disjunctive maxims, and apparently contradictory assertions. These methods are

War Toys: Breaking and Remaking in Great War Narratives

Childrens picturebooks about war explore the encounter with death through the animation, destruction, and mending of symbolic toys. To empower the child caught in the machinery of war and loss, these stories oscillate between breaking and remaking, as they articulate cycles of adventure and return, explosive victories and traumatic suffering. By layering verbal and visual narratives, as well as inversions in the relationships of power, some stories invite complexly ironic readings. Animals mediate between human and inhuman, and codes of size evoke latent vulnerabilities. Toys perform cultural work that includes the reinscription of disrupted gender roles and the naturalization of a social order that depends upon disorderly violence.

Souvenirs of death

Abstract War souvenirs collected from 1914 to 1918 by soldiers and civilians, men and women, offered a symbolic route of communication with the realm of death. Through the culture of war objects, collectors consciously staked claims about historical authenticity and about military power. For the soldier, a souvenir could serve as an aide-mmoire to actualize the past and to trigger narrative. For a grieving widow, a souvenir might memorialize the dead. Just as collections of objects build series, war narratives build on lists that collect objects, vignettes about individual soldiers, and a succession of losses. When narrative breaks down, such lists foreground the problem of connection and the difficulty of constructing meaning out of calamity. The importance of these uncanny objects springs from the collective experience of trauma.

Other Fronts and Conflicts in German Nursing Accounts

Conflicts in German-speaking nurses’ accounts of the Great War point to the stress of their service in Finland, Russia, and Poland, as well as Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Croatia. Ranging from a seventeen-year-old volunteer to a trained middle-aged professional, these women worked first in the rear echelon, then also in field hospitals, sanitary trains and prison camps. Their diaries and letters express three kinds of conflict in line with their dedication to their soldier-brothers. Their hostility to enemy culture pulled against their medical duty of neutrality. Even more strikingly they responded with irony and defiance to institutional and organizational challenges they had to meet, as they assumed new roles that gave them self-confidence. Dealings with lazy or corrupt medical superiors, the military, and prostitutes tested their medical and diplomatic skills and elicited powerfully ironic indictments. Facing the contradictions of military medicine, nurses voiced inner conflicts that point toward trauma.

Travel as Construction of Self and Nation

Through encounters with “others,” travel can enable the discovery or reconstruction of oneself. Margaret R. Higonnet argues that in response to the American Revolution and the Franco-Prussian War, nineteenth-century fictions for children linked voyages to the shaping of a nation out of disparate regions and social elements. She finds that in Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827, Hope Leslie: Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts. Ed. M. Kelley. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press) and G. Bruno’s Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (1877, Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: Devoir et patrie, livre de lecture courante avec 200 gravures instructives pour lecons de choses. Paris: Belin), historical conflicts and displacements traumatized children at the same time as conditions of violence enabled them to become social actors in a period of nation formation. Threads that run through these texts are the mapping of difference, the memory of the historical past, and the invention of a “national family.” The two women authors project new nations as non-violent imagined communities.

Introduction: Comparing Queerly, Queering Comparison

What does it mean to compare? The answer to this question is often taken for granted: highlighting both similarities and differences between what is being compared. The comparative essay is one of the most common of undergraduate writing exercises, but when one notices how frequently students use arguments that go something like “A and B are both alike and different,” one realizes that the key question is not what is a comparison but when is a comparison worth making. How many teachers have found themselves pointing out to students that, of course, A and B are both alike and different; if they were not different at all, B would be A. If they did not have anything in common, what would be the point of comparing them? A strong comparative argument thus needs to be more specific than simply stating that A and B are both alike and different; it also needs to assert how they are alike and different and why these similarities and differences are relevant. The heart of comparison, one could then say, lies somewhere between almost totally different but not quite and almost the same but not quite; analyzing what exactly lies in this in-between could be said to be the work of comparison and comparative studies. Yet while one might think comparison is essential to comparative studies, at least one well-known comparatist has argued otherwise.

Politik auf dem Spielplatz

Im letzten Jahrzehnt hat die feministische Literaturwissenschaft der Kinderliteraturforschung neue Perspektiven eroffnet. Die bedeutendsten Erfolge sind im Hinblick auf die Gattungsanalyse erzielt worden. Man hat beispielsweise untersucht, wie die narrativen Strukturen etwa des Bildungsromans sich andern, wenn sein Protagonist nicht, wie ublich, mannlich, sondern weiblich ist; oder wie unterschiedlich die fiktionalen Stimmen mannlicher und weiblicher Autoren von Autobiographien klingen In der amerikanischen Literaturwissenschaft gingen diese Fortschritte einher mit der Erkenntnis, das literarische immer auch politische Strukturen sind und das Konzepte von Mannlichkeit und Weiblichkeit oder auch von Identitatsbildung soziale Konstrukte darstellen.