ABSTRACT
The Great War could not be described in inherited language. Out of the post-war silences, a new voice of memory – part modernist, part oppositional – arose: the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Issac Rosenberg, as well as Eliot; the art of Otto Dix, Georg Grosz and Paul Nash; the prose of Hemingway and Woolf, each helped establish the truth-telling vocabulary and sparse diction of modern remembering. An emphasis on ‘thisness’, on an economy of expression, challenges not only the heroic cant of past militarist rhetoric, but also the techno-military euphemisms of the future. This links it to the critical literature and art of and about World War Two, and to Vietnam; and also to the nuclear threat and the revisiting of the Great War as a template in the 1960s and 1980s. This new language – ironic, sceptical and essentially anti-militarist – was, as Paul Fussell argues, central to modern memory.
