'To dream as I have never dreamed before': Dreams in First World War Literature and Culture
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: English Faculty
Abstract
A Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with Imperial War Museums, this thesis seeks to provide new sensory insight into and interpretation of the Museums' collections relating to the First World War. It is often stated that the War brought about manifold sensory changes for combatants (with less consideration of the experiences of non-combatants and civilians, who will be included here), forcing a recalibration of sensory hierarchies. However, a substantial study into the cultural representation of sense experiences of the War has not been undertaken.
The thesis will investigate the creative representation of sensory experience across a diverse corpus of material, connecting a range of cultural forms that will include literature, visual arts and culture, cinema and music, from the IWM's collections and elsewhere. It will move between canonised texts and little or unconsidered objects of cultural production, using an inclusive, non-compartmentalising framework to compare writings, visual culture, audio material and ephemera. I hope to convey, and work within, a vibrant cultural ecosystem reflective of both the IWM's wide-ranging collections and the vast number of ways in which sensory experience of the War has been communicated. Original links and connections will be forged that shape new understandings capable of elucidating the cultural-sensory impact of the War. Access to the IWM curatorial team will be valuable in considering the thinking behind exhibiting the sensory war from 1917 to the present day. It is likely to be structured in thematically by the sensory spaces of wartime. These include the dream space, performance spaces, medical spaces, domestic spaces, spaces of death and the exhibiting spaces, both during and in the aftermath of the war. Attention will be paid to the Western Front alongside less conventionally considered sites of war.
The thesis will interrogate three central research questions: how was sensory perception impacted by the War? What is the relationship between sense experience and representation? What role do, or can, the senses take in the memorialisation of the War today? Questions of whether sensory experience can be shared or even expressed will be considered, both in representations contemporaneous with the War, and in subsequent, formally diverse works. Questions of empathy and affective modes of historical engagement will be raised in relation to specifically sensory modes of understanding and contemplation.
In Touch and Intimacy in the First World War (2005) Santanu Das, who supervises the doctorate, argued for scholarship that attends to perceptions and languages of a haptic and bodily nature observable in wartime literature: 'the texture of such experience is fundamental to, and provides new ways of understanding, First World War literature and art.' The ubiquity of the senses in writing of and about the war demands a sensory interpretation which recuperates the charged and embodied state of participants. In interrogating the body and the senses in the cultural production of the war, I follow in the path forged by Das, along with Joanna Bourke, Sarah Cole, and others. The thesis will move on from work on modernist touch by scholars such as Abbie Garrington (2013), to a broader consideration including the 'sixth sense', which grew in significance following the War.
The sensory turn has been marked by an attendance to what Constance Classen has termed a sensory history 'from below [...] inside and [...] from in between'. The doctorate will use a sensory approach to excavate intimate histories and understand cultural shifts of the early twentieth century. The thesis will argue that such an approach is both apposite and necessary in researching the heightened bodily experience of the War and resultant sensory representation, as it moves ever further out of living memory.
The thesis will investigate the creative representation of sensory experience across a diverse corpus of material, connecting a range of cultural forms that will include literature, visual arts and culture, cinema and music, from the IWM's collections and elsewhere. It will move between canonised texts and little or unconsidered objects of cultural production, using an inclusive, non-compartmentalising framework to compare writings, visual culture, audio material and ephemera. I hope to convey, and work within, a vibrant cultural ecosystem reflective of both the IWM's wide-ranging collections and the vast number of ways in which sensory experience of the War has been communicated. Original links and connections will be forged that shape new understandings capable of elucidating the cultural-sensory impact of the War. Access to the IWM curatorial team will be valuable in considering the thinking behind exhibiting the sensory war from 1917 to the present day. It is likely to be structured in thematically by the sensory spaces of wartime. These include the dream space, performance spaces, medical spaces, domestic spaces, spaces of death and the exhibiting spaces, both during and in the aftermath of the war. Attention will be paid to the Western Front alongside less conventionally considered sites of war.
The thesis will interrogate three central research questions: how was sensory perception impacted by the War? What is the relationship between sense experience and representation? What role do, or can, the senses take in the memorialisation of the War today? Questions of whether sensory experience can be shared or even expressed will be considered, both in representations contemporaneous with the War, and in subsequent, formally diverse works. Questions of empathy and affective modes of historical engagement will be raised in relation to specifically sensory modes of understanding and contemplation.
In Touch and Intimacy in the First World War (2005) Santanu Das, who supervises the doctorate, argued for scholarship that attends to perceptions and languages of a haptic and bodily nature observable in wartime literature: 'the texture of such experience is fundamental to, and provides new ways of understanding, First World War literature and art.' The ubiquity of the senses in writing of and about the war demands a sensory interpretation which recuperates the charged and embodied state of participants. In interrogating the body and the senses in the cultural production of the war, I follow in the path forged by Das, along with Joanna Bourke, Sarah Cole, and others. The thesis will move on from work on modernist touch by scholars such as Abbie Garrington (2013), to a broader consideration including the 'sixth sense', which grew in significance following the War.
The sensory turn has been marked by an attendance to what Constance Classen has termed a sensory history 'from below [...] inside and [...] from in between'. The doctorate will use a sensory approach to excavate intimate histories and understand cultural shifts of the early twentieth century. The thesis will argue that such an approach is both apposite and necessary in researching the heightened bodily experience of the War and resultant sensory representation, as it moves ever further out of living memory.
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ORCID iD |
| Chloe Nahum (Student) |