{"id":238,"date":"2015-06-22T11:19:03","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T11:19:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/?p=238"},"modified":"2015-06-22T11:19:03","modified_gmt":"2015-06-22T11:19:03","slug":"the-poetics-of-war-remembering-conflict-from-ancient-greece-to-the-great-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/?p=238","title":{"rendered":"The Poetics of War: Remembering Conflict from Ancient Greece to the Great War"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Emma Bridges<\/em><\/p>\n

Last week I attended\u00a0an international conference entitled\u00a0‘The Poetics of War’<\/a>\u00a0at University College London. For researchers like me, whose work focuses on cultural responses to armed conflict in the ancient world, reflections on the centenary of the First World War <\/a>provide the opportunity for drawing comparisons between the memorialisation of wars\u00a0in more recent history and those of the classical past. This conference brought together classical scholars as well as those working in other fields, and our shared interests in\u00a0the ways in which war is remembered\u00a0from a range of different perspectives – personal, local, and national –\u00a0and via\u00a0different\u00a0written and artistic\u00a0media\u00a0made for some thought-provoking discussions.\"Poetics<\/a><\/p>\n

Topics covered ranged from ancient Greek and Roman literary, monumental and artistic commemorations of war to the ways in which more recent conflicts \u2013 the Crimean War as well as World War I \u2013 have been memorialised. We thought too about the overlap between these periods, and in particular about many of the ways in which the classical tradition has influenced more recent responses to war. Particular highlights for me included Edith Hall\u2019s keynote lecture on David Jones\u2019 modernist war poem In Parenthesis<\/em><\/a>, and a talk by Elizabeth Vandiver, whose important work on classical influences on the poetry of the First World War<\/a> is an outstanding example of recent work in classical reception studies.<\/p>\n

In my own paper I sought to bring something of my own research into female perspectives on war<\/a> to the conference. I focused on a twentieth century historical novel by Naomi Mitchison<\/a>, Cloud Cuckoo Land<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>(1925) which, although set in the closing years of the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BC, also reflects some of the wartime experiences of the generation of women who had lived through World War I. Although 1920s literature is something of a departure for me in relation to previous research I\u2019ve undertaken, the opportunity to think about how some of the themes of my work might resurface in this historical period was a valuable one. In particular it led to interesting conversations about gender roles in wartime and the extent to which war narratives are often dominated by male voices, as well as women\u2019s engagement with the classical tradition.<\/p>\n

As always at such an event it is those exchanges with other scholars working in related fields which offer the opportunity to make fresh connections \u2013 both in terms of meeting new people and in thinking about the material on which we are working. If it\u2019s a sign of a successful conference to\u00a0return home\u00a0with both a reading list and a contacts list that are longer than they were at the start of the event, this occasion was certainly a fruitful one!<\/p>\n

All talks from the conference were recorded and will be available in due course via the YouTube channel of UCL\u2019s Classics department<\/a>; I\u2019ll post the link here when they are live.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Emma Bridges Last week I attended\u00a0an international conference entitled\u00a0‘The Poetics of War’\u00a0at University College London. For researchers like me, whose work focuses on cultural responses to armed conflict in the ancient world, reflections on the centenary of the First World War provide the opportunity for drawing comparisons between the memorialisation of wars\u00a0in more recent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[8,19,18],"class_list":["post-238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences","tag-classical-reception","tag-poetry","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=238"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":245,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238\/revisions\/245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}