This being the second entry in Alex's Star Wars Literature Meme Archive

When you feel woefully underprepared after missing class on New Historicism and have to wing it for the blog post

Prequel memes are here to stay everybody. Brush up

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrequelMemes/comments/8129f3/when_you_realize_the_entire_prequel_trilogy/

In my brief exposure to New Historicism, I was struck by a couple things, one of which was this quotation from Sassoon's "Repression of War Experience":

Now light the candles; one; two; there's a moth;

What silly beggars they are to blunder in

And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame—

No, no, not that,—it's bad to think of war,

When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you;

I love everything about it—the transition from the mundane to the glorified in the unsteady narrator's mind is incredibly poetic.

Another thing that struck me is how how much effort New Historicism requires. If any critical approach were to be considered a science, it shouldn't be New Criticism, it should be New Historicism, with its critics and scholars compiling data (co-texts) to deduce meanings from literature. But alas, this is quotes and questions week, not paragraph week.

I can't help but wonder if New Historicism is applicable in the present. Can we utilize this lens to better understand modern texts, whether fictional or non-fictional prose, or poetry? Or does New Historicism only work to offer salience to older texts? I think it is tempting to assume clarity of mind and thought in understanding a work of modern literature and its co-texts, but it may not be entirely possible.

What are People Thinking?

From Male Hysteria  by W. H. R. Rivers he states that "[s]hell shock was so obviously a retreat from the war that the British military initially tried to keep it from the public;" 

Then after a few lines down he continues with "when they realized that shell shock did not have an organic cause, many military authorities refused to treat victims as disabled and maintained that they should not be given pensions or honorable discharges." 

Fear controls people more then they would like others to believe, so when something unknown and potentially unstable arises, people let the fear control them. 

Why does the public matter so much when the people that are hurting the most are trampled under foot? 

a changed generation

"The French instituted a system of keeping men suffering from shell-shock in rest hospitals  behind the front instead of sending them home to their families. They did this because they found that a nervous disease was better treated in the hard medical environment of the camp than letting the patients return to their families, where they were sympathized with an 'Molly-coddled.'" (Misnomer)

Looking at the big picture

Dang, as much as I enjoyed getting out of school for a day, I was really enjoying this unit on New Historicism. Of all the literary analysis techniques we've explored I personally felt like New Historicism was the one that seemed most practical. An aspect of New Historicism that took me by surprise was the amount and diversity of co-texts a New Historicist goes through, using everything from books to research trips to an actual location of where a scene in a book took place. Looking at the authors life, what the world was like at the time a text was written, all those things, they are too important to be ignored when looking at the meaning of a lot of works of literature. Just looking at the examples in class, without the field documents, the footage of of the soldiers, the news paper articles and scientific essays, how would we ever have been able to understand the poems as deeply as we did.

Can Emotions Really be Repressed?

Form the article "Male Hysteria," I found the idea of repression and the ways it is accepted to be quite unusual. The acceptance of "shell-shock" between officer and soldier stands on opposing viewpoints. For example, in comparison to a soldier, "the officer, on the other hand, has a more 'complex and varied' mental life, the benefit of a public-school education, which has taught him successfully to repress, not only expressions of fear, but also the emotion itself''" (75). It is thought highly of the officers to repress thier emotions.

First of all, the anxiety and symptoms caused by "shell-shock" are different between the officer and the soldier. A soldier is described as experiencing "hysteria - paralysis, blindness, deafness, contracture of a limb, mutism, [and] limping," while the symptoms of an officer was percieved as "neurasthenic symptoms, such as nightmares, insomnia, heart palpitations, dizziness, depression, or disorientation" (74). Therefore, neurasthenia was seen as "selfless and noble" (75).

The idea that emotions should be repressed is regarded as the proper way to go about having these dreadful emotions. However, looking at the poems we have read in class from Owen and Sassoon, is the ability to repress one's emotions really possible? It is clear in the poems that no matter how hard the soldier tried to forget his past experiences and focus on the present, his mind would somehow revert back to his sights from the war. In these poems, the soldiers show compelling evidence that they are tormented by their experiences in the war. It seems likely that they would need to focus directly on what is bothering them as a way to resolve thier issues and make sense of what has happened before they can move on and live in the present. However, this crucial technique to bring soldiers back to health is pushed aside in "Male Hysteria" and repression is regarded as the best option. Repression seems to represent the ideology of the society at the time, since any expression of emotion was seen seen as week or as just an unacceptable form of behavior. The reason why neurasthenia was seen as noble could relate to its symptoms being portrayed more internally, while hysteria is seen more externally. For neurasthenia, one could hide thier depression from others, and nightmares and insomnia may only be presented to family members who live in the same house as the soldier experiencing these symptoms. In relation to hysteria, being blind, deaf, and limping are all sort of obvious to the general public. That is why Officers, who experience neurasthenia, are percieved in a better light than the soldiers, who experience "unacceptable" symptoms of hysteria.

Mentos in Soda Experiment

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/ShimadaK2007Sept09-MentosGeyser_DSC_3294%2B%2B.JPG

Just like the tension created when the mentos are mixed with the soda, the soldiers emotions are so tense and unbearable that they are unable to be contained and repressed. If they try to, they will end up expelling out thier emotions one way or another (paralysis, nightmares, etc). 

New Historicism - Right Under Our Noses

In my sophomore year of high school, our world history and English teachers tried their best to sync what we were learning in each class. For example, when we were discussing Greece in history, we read the Odyssey in English. When we were learning about World War II, we read Night by Elie Wiesel. And when we learned about World War I, we read All Quiet on the Western Front. At the time that we read All Quiet, we also read the poem Dulce et Decorum est by Wilfred Owen. At the time, I was not aware that we were using New Historicism. We were using the context we were given in history class to better understand the texts. Without the context of what was happening at the time, I don't think some of the mindsets within the stories or the decisions the characters made would have made as much sense. Realizing that I had been doing New Historicism without me even knowing about it was interesting--how many other literary theories have we been using without realizing it?

https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Western-Front-Erich-Remarque/dp/0449213943

Uh, War is Really Scary

With the topic of WWI and shell shock, not only in this class but in all my classes, I’ve been horrified. I think its the combination of all the poems and short stories about the feeling of anxiety that occurred in that time. What’s even worse is that all the real horror is that it all actually happened. This brings me to my question; What is the most horrifying time period for historical fiction writers? It doesn’t have to be genre horror, but any horrifying feeling you’ve felt because you couldn’t even begin to imagine what is like to be a person in the character’s situation. This week also made me want to ask what period of time my classmates like to read about the most, and why? 

Reading anything about war that ever occurred.

Source: https://gfycat.com/gifs/tag/scared

Within and Without

      New Historicism is a wonderful perspective that threads itself together with a certain time and the art it produces. While it involves a fair amount of research and understanding when approaching literature, I think there's something to be said for acknowledging history and its products on an equal level. However the art presents itself (as protest, poetry, commentary, praise, pondering, etc.), it will always be in some way touched by the time it was created in: the writer cannot completely revoke their culture or experience, or even the events of past history that brought them to where they were when they created their work.
      New Critics might be affronted by New Historicism's complete focus on both the text and its influences, but in many ways they seek the same desire to understand the purpose of what the writing is saying and how it says it. Sassoon and Owen's poems were enhanced when we were given the historical context of shell shock and how people viewed and treated it, but we were also able to gain a soldier's perspective on these views as we analyzed the poems at the same time, with the same context, as the articles and documents. In this way, the value of New Historicism is undeniable.

Films like The Fighting 69th showcase and discuss the harsh effects of WW1, including 'unmanly' cowardice.

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/b0/17/b7/b017b77d63ceac075442eccecd431b43.jpg

Haunted

In Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum est, there were a couple line that I found particularly haunting. Owen writes that, "Behind the wagon that we flung him in,/And watch the white eyes writing in his face,/His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin," about a man who could not get his gas mask on in time and died because of the gas released on them. (18-20) The description alone is enough to leave me a bit haunted by a memory that was not mine. Do you feel the same way about this section of this poem?

Gif: http://untethered.textplus.com/post/77083070561/5-overreactions-to-common-cell-phone

Maybe we're all mental cases

(Found at: https://supernaturalgospel.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/hell.jpg)

     During our discussion on Wednesday, we ended by talking about Wilfred Owen's poem "Mental Cases." I though we made considerable progress in analyzing the poem, but we didn't make it to talking about the last couple of lines, which I found particularly significant. The questions that comprise the opening of the poem ask who "these hellish," these "mental cases" are, but the last line answers a different question all together. They serve to answer how they got to be "mental cases" to begin with. The answer is chilling: "Snatching after us who smote them, brother, / Pawing us who dealt them war and madness" (219). The speaker changes the focus of the poem, from describing the men ravaged and tormented by war to laying the burden on himself and the society that sent these men into hell for their sake. Knowing this, I looked back over the poem and it gave a new layer of meaning. Not only does it describe the physical and mental degradation of those sent to war, but it also claims that we are the reason it is the case. We are responsible for "deal[ing] them war and madness." As such, we must remember our own part in the desecration of their innocence and humanity. Perhaps the question of "who these hellish" are is not merely asking who these men are, but telling us that we too are hellish. Does it not make us even more hellish that we have rendered these men unrecognizable?