The Great War and Modern Memory

The Great War and Modern Memory brought out change to language, literature, and other aspects of cultural memory. The horrible conflicts that were brought out to the 19th century innocence had incubated the irony and pessimism that has influenced 20th century letters, politics, and popular opinion. Paul Fussell examines and analyzes literature, essays, poetry, and letters home. This book is mainly about World War I British literacy, and history. Irony plays a big role in this book, an irony between expectations and reality. Before the war, men could and did believe in gallantry, in battle as a sport and in idealized patriotism. After the thousands of British were killed in only four months time, irony became the dominant literary mode. The main irony in this book was that the population rushed to support the war in order to support these 19th century ideals. These ideals had been shattered in the war that gave birth to the 20th century. The book documents how World War I gave us the standardized form, the wristwatch, daylight savings time, civilian censorship and bureaucratic substitution. This book is about the effects of World War I on human consciousness and attitudes. The author, Paul Fussell, delivers an image to people that the war was reflected in the literature. This book was a critique about many things. One that caught my attention was the argument about the modern distrust of language. He uses Hemingways quote from A Farewell To Arms, where he states abstract words such as glory, honor courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the number of regiments, and the dates. Before the war no one would have understood this. There were many things in this book that caught my eye. As Fussell has noted "no front-line soldier or officer was without his amulet and every tunic pocket became a reliquary so urgent was the ne...