The Great War in Memoir and Memory (Penn Global Seminar)

Catalog description

World War One was the primordial catastrophe of twentieth-century history. For all who passed through it, the Great War was transformative, presenting a profound rupture in personal experience. It was a war that unleashed an unprecedented outpouring of memoirs and poetic and fictional accounts written by participants. In its wake, it also produced new forms of public commemoration and memorialization - tombs to the unknown soldier, great monuments, soldiers' cemeteries, solemn days of remembrance, and the like. One hundred years after World War One, this course will explore the war through the intersection of these processes of personal and public memory. (Please note: This is not a seminar in military or diplomatic history, but rather an exploration of personal experiences of the War, representations of experience, and the cultural and political dimensions of memory.) The course will end with a one week visit to the Western Front region of northern France. Travel to sites in northern France will allow us to consider the scale and topography of some of the major battles, visit cemeteries and ossuaries and reflect on their various forms of secular and sacred organization, various national war monuments, and WWI museums, including the pathbreaking museum in Peronne and the national WWI museum in Meaux.