ENGLISH 125D Lecture 16: 10/12 Mrs Dalloway - language of WWI, Septimus
Document Summary
Early 20c: am/br war poets were some of the most prominent, poems steeped in exp of trench warfare. So many of the artists/thinkers of the time were veterans, or knew veterans, or witnessed the war as civilians. War shaped the mind/consc/thought of ppl at the time. Novel"s been read in different ways in terms of woolf"s biography formal school, modes of experimentation. But have to look at context of war p14 - septimus warren smith, aged abt 30 . Some critic argued that wwi introduced irony and euphemism, language that can"t capture the scope of horror, technical lang of bureaucr. Expression over the top - from wwi, when we sent ppl over the top of trenches to be mowed down - fails to capture the horrors of reality. Septimus is frozen in time, a single point around which there"s all this activity/circulating rumor; -not rumor, not speculation, not attempt to find.
