Hier, je rentre à la maison et découvre le message qu'une collègue d'histoire-géographie a envoyé à tous les enseignants depuis la messagerie de l'ENT au sujet de leur baïonnette : Nous avons donc une baïonnette de la première guerre mondiale dans la nature soit au lycée on ne sait où, soit chez un professeur. Bien bien.
Introduction Space, setting, the interaction between landscape and mindscape and the curious similarities between outdoors places in Scotland and the landscape of the Flanders correspond to the writer's intention of similarity: the characters are so obsessed by the war that they see it in Scotland. This obsession ultimately transforms their vision of time. I. The present is the past Indeed, the characters have no present. It applies to all traumatized soldiers: conscious: remembering. unconscious: hallucination For instance, Sassoon had hallucinations […]
Study of a passage p.37-38: "he got off at the next stop [...] whine of shells". This passage is not a dialogue. The narrator is telling us about Burns. Presence of realistic elements: stress on concrete details ("a tuft of grey wool"). Use of chronological order + realistic framework. Everything is seen through Burns's subjectivity: he is the central focalizer and we move from an objective description of landscape to a subjective mindscape. I - Presence of subjectivity A - […]
How human beings presented in Regeneration are different from historical characters ? Paradoxically, several characters had real historical existence and yet, there is no difference between those who really existed and those invented: it seems that they are on the same level. The major difference lays in characterization, i.e. the ways in which human beings are constructed in characters. In history books, the stress is usually on public life whereas in fictions the stress is on subjectivity. Regeneration is a […]
Study of the passage p11-12: from "What kind of questions did they ask.." to "with quite a bit of his leg left inside". This is the first real dialogue between Rivers and Sassoon. Sassoon is presented as shell-shocked. This passage is composed of a dialogue and 12 lines of narrative. Most of the narrative comments describe Sassoon's behaviour. I. Dialogue and verisimilitude Dialogue enhances verisimilitude. Rivers is a psychiatrist and Sassoon is the patient. It is a normal professional situation. […]
Is Regeneration a novel with a plot ? It is not as obvious as in a detective story. I. Sassoon's transformation Must be seen in the changes that occurred between the beginning and the end of the novel. At the beginning, Sassoon has just protested against fighting the war. At the end, something has changed: "no, I want to go back" (p.213). He has stopped his protest and has made the decision to go back to the front.He hesitates between […]
An hostile nature Use of an adjective of color (yellow) The sun and the light are described as yellow, which is a warm color not normally applied to natural light. p.175, l.2: "fading to yellow".Yellow not presented as a bright color, paradox. p.128: "yellowing of the light", "sulfurous".Attribute of Lucifer, negative connotation. p.199: "like an artificial sunset".The natural light of the sun has gone.Yellow is linked to the war. Yellow is associated with light, with Sarah's skin (because of the […]
Regeneration has to do with World War One (WW1) and it is visible right from its cover. The novelist, Pat Barker is one of the first women writers who have written about the Great War. Pat Barker is a university-trained historian and this is confirmed by the presence of very reliable sources in the "Author's Notes", at the end of the novel. Regeneration is a historical novel on the surface but is really more than that. I. Historical accuracy Several […]
Biography Wilfried Owen was born in the West of England and educated in a technical college. He left England in 1913 to teach English in Bordeaux (France) and came back in 1915 to enlist. He was soon commissioned and injured in March 1917. He was sent to Craiglockheart where he met Wilfried Sassoon. Returned to the Front in 1918 and was killed one week before the end of the war. Owen found his own voice in the trenches, although he […]
Introduction War poetry is not a school of poetry in itself but it played a tremendous part since it inspired a new birth of inspiration. It was a totally new experience: nothing like that before in poetry, no war like WW1 before. War had already been a subject for poetry but never with such feelings. In English consciousness, in 1914, war was fought by processionals away from home and many people thought it glamorous. Before 1914, war poems would have […]
