ENGL 2655 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Pat Barker
Document Summary
English: modern literature, poetry of first world war. Flashback page 16: arras - passing soldiers" bodies over and over. Black staircase page 17 like a trench without a sky . Page 38 burns" weird vision in the forest. Historical novel that uses intense research of documents, diaries, poems, etc. , constructs an archive. Something that mixes fact and fiction: what does a novelist do that a historian can"t, author and historian can show the same thing when it comes to sassoon"s declaration: can show military authority, role of medicine, social class. Prior is not part of historical record - might have to do with class. When rivers first meets prior he corrects his spelling. When we hear 60,000 people die we know nothing about those people. Normal attending story tends to be anonymous, loses identity, merges with industrial violence and war, becomes part of mud whereas officers would be mentioned in historical record: staging of ethical dilemmas.
