Venue: Leigh Scott Room, Baillieu Library
Presenters: Professor Emeritus Martyn Lyons
Over 38 years ago, in The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell examined the literary dimensions of the First World War for British combatants. Fussell was primarily concerned with the officer class, a well-read and articulate elite whose war experience did not necessarily reflect that of other ranks.
Professor Emeritus Lyons' paper does not forget the officer elite, but seeks to broaden the focus to include the reading and writing of ordinary people during the war years. In drawing evidence from French and Italian soldiers, the lecture will also refer to prisoners of war. He argues that the trenches constituted a reading community, where soldiers shared similar values, and similar expectations of and appetites for reading. They devoured newspapers while paradoxically maintaining a healthy cynicism towards their exaggerations and falsehoods. They read for information, for recreation and for clues to understand their own involvement in the war. At the same time, the trenches were also writing communities in which soldiers plunged into an epistolary frenzy of bulimic proportions. They wrote for similar purposes, in similarly laconic prose and they sometimes wrote, just as they read, in common.
This event is to coincide with the Somewhere in France - Australians on the Western Front exhibition at the Noel Shaw Gallery, Baillieu Library from 11 March - 26 June 2016.
from
https://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/6181-reading-and-writing-communities-in-the-trenches-1914-1918-france
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