WWI swayed works of great litterateurs
Eminent scholars of English studies yesterday depicted what impacts the World War I had on artists and litterateurs around the globe and how those were articulated in their works.
“Modernism has long been associated with the First World War. Major writers and artists like Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, fought in it. Others like Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot reflected obliquely on its aftermath,” said Joe Brooker, director of the Centre for Contemporary Literature, UK.
“The effect of the Great War was so big that it changed the social, economic and cultural scenario all over the world. The romantics faced a profound change in the literary arena. The writers abolished all traditional values and formed a rebellion against social and political aristocracies. They paved the paths for the modernists,” said Bangladeshi writer and critic Jackie Kabir.
“Modernism was the antiwar movement in literature,” she added.
Speaking on the final day of the two-day conference, "The Great War and English Studies", at Dhaka University, the scholars also pointed out how the war influenced Bangladesh's national poet Kazi Nazrul Islam.
“Without Nazrul Islam's experience in the 49th Bengal [the infantry regiment that fought in WWI], 'Bidrohi' would not have been what it is,” opined Niaz Zaman, supernumerary professor of English, DU.
The English department organised the conference to mark the centenary of the four-year war that broke out in 1914, and its impacts on fine arts, film, literature and life.
Dwelling on the relation between Irish novelist and poet James Joyce's work and the war, Brooker said that as the war tore up the existing world, Joyce fashioned another world, in art, as an alternative to it.
He then cited a part of an interview by Joyce where the writer said, “As an artist I am against every state....Naturally I can't approve of the act of the revolutionary who tosses a bomb in a theatre to destroy the king and his children. On the other hand, have those states behaved any better which drowned the world in a bloodbath?”
Describing Nazrul Islam's wartime "adventure", Niaz Zaman said, “With a few hundred other Bangalees, Nazrul travelled all the way across India to join his regiment at Karachi.”
The two and a half years Nazrul spent in Karachi were crucial, she said. “His life in the army gave him the opportunity to concentrate on his reading and writing.”
Discussing Ernest Hemmingway's "A Farewell to Arms" and Nazrul's novel "Badhon Hara" (unfettered) that contains a detailed account of life in Karachi barracks, Jackie Kabir said the two writers portrayed the time of transition in two different parts of the world.
“Hemmingway talks about the violence that shook the world and changed the way people thought in days to come, whereas Nazrul talks about the inner violence the soldier felt at the time when everything was in a chaotic form.”
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