Instead of class:
Select one prompt from among the list below, and use the respite from class to write an essay (of a few paragraphs) in response to it.
Be sure to identify which prompt you are writing on at the top of your essay
Submit your essay to Mark by email at: PVDClementeVets@gmail.com
WRITING RESPITE: WWI and WWII
Please pick one question below, and write a response. Draw on specific readings or images when you can, to help support and illustrate the points you want to make. Just a few paragraphs will suffice. When you’ve finished, email the paper to Mark at PVDClementeVets@gmail.com. He’ll get the paper to the relevant faculty member, who will give you constructive feedback. If you can, try to get the writing to us by Thursday March 3rd.
1. Based on our discussion of WWII posters and Rockwell's Four Freedoms, choose one poster from the Rockwell Museum collection and answer the following questions: What message is the artist sending and to/for whom? How does form create meaning - i.e. how does color, line, composition, text, etc. work to convey the intended message? What emotions are meant to be elicited by this work and how is this achieved? Can you think of a contemporary example of visual propaganda that has affected or swayed you in a similar way?
2. The powerful prints and paintings of Otto Dix and Kathe Kollwitz draw us into both the physical and emotional spaces of combat, loss and grief. Select one or two works by either - or both - of these artists and describe the ways that they delineate or embody the experience of war and its aftermath. Try to craft your response in formal terms such as composition, color, line quality, or shades of dark and light and offer an interpretation of the work in terms of response to it. Note: feel free to choose a work that was not discussed in class if you are so inclined. You may also select from those we looked at together. The Dix/Kollwitz images can be found on the Google Site page for January 31st.
3. During our January 27th class on World War I and literature, Mark showed us some quotes from French and British veterans of that conflict (Mark has posted the Powerpoint on the Google Site for 1/27). All of them, in various ways, reflect on either the lingering impact of their wartime experiences, or on how the war changed them. This is also true of many of the works of art by veterans of 'The Great War" that Suzanne and Ty showed us on January 31st (for example, Otto Dix). Pick one quote, and one work of art (or artist), and draw connections between them. Do any of the works of art express some of the same emotions found in the quote? How? Do you connect with these emotions or thoughts, from your own experiences?
4. Paul Fussell and Studs Terkel share stories with us of the experiences of American soldiers in World War II. Fussell’s experience is a personal one (in the infantry), while Terkel relays the stories of others. What did Fussell and other American soldiers learn (or unlearn) from their combat experiences? If you find it helpful to use some of the tools of existentialism here (the absurd; the distinction between fear/anguish), please do so. If you’ve been deployed, how has what you’ve (un)learned similar or different?
5. In Fussell’s chapter “The Real War Will Never Get in the Books,” he tells us that he and others in the infantry in WWII believed they would never be able to convey their experiences to people back home – and that even if they could, the vast majority of Americans wouldn’t understand it. Fussell: “in un-bombed America especially, the meaning of the war seemed inaccessible. As experience, thus, the suffering was wasted…America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like and has thus been unable to use such understanding to re-interpret and re-define the national reality and to arrive at something like public maturity.” (268). What does he mean here? Is there a lesson to be drawn from this, for our own time?
6. Fussell tells us that he and others in the American infantry during WWII quickly learned that they were “expendable.” Pacific war veteran Eugene Sledge described this as “difficult to accept. We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness. It is a humbling experience.” Why did they think this? Did you ever feel this way, during your military service? How does one grapple with that?
7. We are used to thinking of war as an action or event, but can anything be gained from thinking about war as a place? A place we come home from or a place we can return to after many years? Does a war ever leave its place? Does it haunt a place? What does it mean for countries like Poland, or cities like Dresden, or for areas like Flanders to have had a war take place there? How are foreign wars different from domestic ones? What does it mean to be attacked in one's homeland versus fighting an enemy across the globe? Consider all or some of these questions and write about your perspective on war as a type of place that we can inhabit or leave.
8. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. - Albert Camus
Consider Camus’s claim above - the idea that thinking about the meaning of life or worrying about our own potential actions can open up a can of worms, leaving us more disoriented and uncertain than when we started. What is it that gets undermined when we start to think, do you suppose? Can that be a positive or productive thing? If so, why do people often avoid it? Avoid thinking about their place in the universe and the freedom to make their own meaning?
9. Joe Keller chooses to die by suicide in All My Sons. Kate Keller chooses to avoid the truth of her reality by escaping back into habit, false hope, and delusion. Yet there are other characters in the play who have suffered as much as, if not more, than Joe and Kate, but who do not choose what Camus would call capitulation to the Absurd (either through suicide or falling back into avoidance and habit). Using some of Camus’s ideas about suicide and/or Warburton’s summary of existential views on freedom, write about how different characters in All My Sons respond to challenges and the burden of facing reality.
10. Continuing with work begun in class, consider how Sebastian Junger’s observations on wartime bonds and homecoming alienation show up in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Strive to make explicit connections between specific passages in the play and specific passages from Junger. In other words, identify and discuss places in the play where some of Junger’s ideas manifest themselves.