Walls in the 20th Century

Walls in the 20th century

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Picasso in Tres de Febrero

We are very proud in the North West of Buenos Aires. Picasso is visiting Tres de Febrero University. From May 29th to September 10th we will be able to enjoy 60 works by the great Spanish artist at the MUNTREF – Museo de la Universidad Nacional de Tres de febrero. The exhibition, “Picasso: The Look of Desire”, has been organized by the Museum, together with Pablo Ruiz Picasso-Casa Natal. It reviews desire, a driving force in the artist´s work, in different forms: as the bodies observed or created, as the reconstructed body , as the eternal feminine and female loves, among others.
The project will be completed when Argentine works of art chosen by Antonio Berni and curated by Diana B. Wechsler (Untref),are presented next October at the Picasso Museum in Malaga.

You will find further details at: http://www.untref.edu.ar/muntref.

B O Y S´ B O O K S
AND THE GREAT WAR

Michael Paris looks at the romanticised image of war in boys´popular fiction prior to 1914, and at the sustaining appeal of the genre in spite of the realities of that event.

In September 1914, nineteen-year-old Roland Leighton wrote to his close friend Vera Brittain,

"I Feel I am meant to take some active part in this war. It is to me a very fascinating thing- something, if often horrible, yet very ennobling and very beautiful, something whose elemental reality raises it above the reach of cold theorising. You will call me a militarist, you may be right."

Leighton, like most other young men of his age, had grown to manhood under the spell of the pleasure culture of war – the experience of war transformed into romantic and chivalric stories for the entertainment of the young, and which had become increasingly common during the later nineteenth century. These fictions, however, were not only a source of exciting and escapist adventure, but promoted patriotism, manliness and a simplistic imperial worldview that emphasised duty and the need for sacrifice if the British Empire was to endure. They indoctrinated their readers with the credo that an Englishman was more than a match for any mere foreigner; that war was a game, and that battle was an exciting experience in which young men could demonstrate their loyalty to the motherland and find fame and honour. In the popular novels of F.A.Henry, Captain E.S.Brereton, Herbert Strang, Percy F. Westerman and Robert Leighton, and tin the pages of The Boy´s Own Paper, Pluck, The Boy´s Friend and countless other story papers, young men were captivated by thrilling tales of the little wars of empire such as With Spear and Assegai, Fighting the Matabele, With Kitchener in the Soudan or One of the Fighting Scouts.
Other stories related the exciting events of imaginary future wars as the Russian hordes or the legions of the Kaiser invaded Britain and were only defeated at the last possible monument by English pluck. Indeed so many of these tales appeared in the two decades before 1914, that many young readers were convinced that a great European was virtually inevitable. Yet in these tales of conflict, authors softened, sanitised and romanticised battle, disguising its brutal reality with a veneer of chivalric and sporting imagery, so that in a Henry Newbolt´s Vitai Lampada, a bloody battle in the Sudan could be transformed into little more than a hard fought match between the School and a rather unruly visitors´eleven.
In August 1914, then, young men who, like Rowland Leighton, had grown up with this romantic image of war, volunteered in their thousands for the greatest of all adventures; anxious not that they might be killed or maimed, but only that they would get to France too late to take part in the fighting. But for those too young to enlist, reading about war was the next best thing; as one veteran later recalled, “our curiosity to know what it would be like to be under fire had to be satisfied from the novels of G.A.Henty and Captain F. S. Brereton.” Thus the pleasure culture of war operating through boy´s´fiction had, during the last decades of peace, prepared young men to play their part in the next war and would now continue throughout wthe war years, to act as part of the unofficial propaganda effort to prepare younger boys for future service, by sanitising the realities of war and emphasising the exciting and romantic nature of battle.
But fighting on the Western Front was not the glamorous adventure the young had expected: the reality was brutal, bloody and terrifying. For Roland Leighton, as for many others, a few months in the trenches were enough to expose the lies of this idealised image of war, for as he wrote to Vera Brittain in September 1915:

"Let him who thinks that War is a glorious thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country – let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin bone and what might have its ribs – and let him realise how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous putrescence… "

Leighton’s letter is particularly poignant, for his father, Robert Leighton, was a highly successful writer of boys´fiction who, in his novels had indeed taught his young readers that was a “noble and glorious thing.”

Adapted from: The Boys' War in Making History issue 48

Understanding the text

1. Why does Roland Leighton say that Vera will call him a militarist?
2. What is the difference between real war and the war depicted in fiction books?
3. How did these books work on the boys´ chauvinistic self -esteem?
4. How had fiction prepared boys to be soldiers?
5. Did war live up to their expectations?
6. How does Roland Leighton describe war?
7. What is paradoxical about Roland’s letter?

"The past is a foreign country...

...they do things differently there". Last class we enjoyed the analysis of one of my favourites: "The Go Between" by L.P.Hartley. In this masterpiece, the voices of the past and the present blend to create the picture of the mind of a child who falls in a trap set by two lovers. Leo is cheated by the group of adults that surround him, as well as by the 20th century, which is far from becoming the golden era it had been expected to be.



This is an interesting video about "The Go Between" . Featuring commentary by Dan Callahan of The House Next Door, Slant Magazine and Bright Lights Film Journal. There is a final comparison with another film you´ll have to see after the winter holidays.