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 | | Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare) by Jay Winter ISBN-10: 9780521496827 ISBN-10: 0-521-49682-9 ISBN-13: 9780521496827 ISBN-13: 978-0-521-49682-7 Hardcover 1995-10-27 Cambridge University Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Jay Winter's powerful and substantial new study of the "collective remembrance" of the Great War offers a major reassessment of one of the critical episodes in the cultural history of the twentieth century. Using a wide variety of literary, artistic and architectural evidence, Dr. Winter looks anew at the ways, many of them highly traditional, in which communities endeavored to find collective solace after the carnage of the First World War. The result is a profound and moving book, of seminal importance for the attempt to understand the course of European history during the first half of the twentieth century. | ||
Book Description Jay Winter's powerful and substantial new study of the 'collective remembrance' of the Great War offers a major reassessment of one of the critical episodes in the cultural history of the twentieth century. Using a great variety of literary, artistic and architectural evidence, Dr Winter looks anew at the ways, many of them highly traditional, in which communities endeavoured to find collective solace after 1918. The result is a profound and moving book, of seminal importance for the attempt to understand the course of European history during the first half of the twentieth century. | ||
Reviews | ||
The Great War in Retrospect There are many reasons why World War I has been labeled THE GREAT WAR: it was the war to end all wars in the minds of those who lived through it, who were directly and indirectly affected by it, who continue to reference it as the war with the most emotional cost. In times when wars seems to constantly queue since that inception of world war, wars spreading from WW II, through Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Balkans, Eastern Europe, Spain, Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, South America and on, taking a long hard look at the Great War will hopefully center our attention on a past time that can be analyzed and from which we can hopefully learn. Now that Jay Winters' brilliant book 'Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning : The Great War in European Cultural History' is available/affordable in paperback, every household should have a copy as children grow into the years of this century. Winters' examination of the devastation of WW I and the ways in which it informed all of the arts, the architecture, the literature, films, memorials - the people of the globe - is a mighty assignment and he is more than successful in humanizing his message. This book overflows with photographs of places, faces, bodies alive and dead, paintings, sculptures, film stills - each of which drives home Winters' powerful message. Sad though it may be to admit, war is a part of life on this abused planet: the more we study it the more we hopefully will reduce it. Winters wants to make sure that we remember, that we read, view, walk through, see, hear, and listen to the remnants the Great War left behind. This is a powerful, necessary book and should be required reading and viewing for us all. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, August 05 | ||
Not even the 'Great War' can Kill Tradition Winter himself states in his introduction that he is a dissenter from the 'modernist' school of interpretation when it comes to the cultural legacies of the Great War. He's thinking notably about those interpretations rendered by Paul Fussell or Modris Eksteins who set out to show how the Great War transformed European culture - turning it away from past modes of expression and thought (patriotic certainties, 'high diction' in poetry and prose, high flown and hallowed notions about duty, honor, etc., and a classical esthetic) and towards new modes in all forms of artistic and cultural expression. The surrealist and cubist movements are commonly held examples, or the cryptic writings of Joyce or e.e. cummings. Though Winter does not, as he cannot, dispute such new cultural attitudes he attempts in "Sites of Memory..." to restore some historical balance to the equation. Basically he feels that in looking at the effects the experience of the Great War had on European society too much attention has been given to what changed, and too little to what remained, or at least to those aspects of Europeans' cultural heritage that were called forth as moral buttress to the overwhelming pain and loss of the war. Religious themes would be the most obvious example here. Winter looks at a variety of cultural expressions to find this traditionalism - graveyards, engravings, war monuments, books, cinema. On the whole he did help me rethink the war and did it in a very eloquent way. At times I found myself wondering if this debate over 'ancient and modern' concerning the effects of World War I wasn't stumbling over different definitions of just what 'modern' means. Winter's choice of exhibits in his case for the persistance of the traditional had me wondering when traditional remains traditional and when it becomes a modern reuse of the past. There is nothing new under heaven, after all, and even modernists by necessity must refer to the past to recreate their present. But more to the point, this book does make you think and that's always a good sign. It's a good read and I recommend it. | ||
How WWI touched Vietnam? A pair of books take you there. In this great book, all rituals for coping with the appalling losses of WWI and the everlasting effects over all forms of european cultural manifestation, are covered. But I strongly recommend that you read "Achilles in Vietnam" by Jonathan Shay. Where Dr. Shay treats the individual man, his suffering and eternal scars of body and soul; Dr. Winter jumps to the collective level. If the suffering of people in WWI sound distant to you, start by Achilles in Vietnam... Them imagine all that pain multiplied by millions.. | ||