Burial of the (Un)dead: In Search of the Uncanny in War Poetry


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Can T.

THE JOURNAL OF THE FACULTY OF LANGUAGES AND HISTORY-GEOGRAPHY OF ANKARA UNIVERSITY, vol.51, pp.65-88, 2011 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)

Abstract

War poetry, particularly the poems scribed in the trenches - the burning centre of the combat, generally has a dark and sombre tone as it speaks of violence, bloodshed and death. Psychologically devastated by the appalling experience of the trench warfare, the war poet occupies the liminal space between life and death. He sometimes imagines himself dead; sometimes he converses with the dead, or conversely the dead communicate with him through dreams or phantasms. The recurrent images of dead soldiers, detached body parts, unrecognisable corpses, and ghostly imaginings of traumatised mind create an otherworldly atmosphere, drawing the genre into the terrain of the uncanny, which has been conventionally associated with gothic and fantastic literature. The present study explores the interpretive possibilities that the theory of the uncanny may offer in analysing the traumatic war experience and the presentation of the idea of nationalism in the poetry of the First World War. The present study, as indicated in the title, is a search for the uncanny presented in the poetry of the Great War; however, it also includes other forms of war narratives, such as memorial monuments, memoirs and letters in order to compare different discourses that came together around the war and its rhetoric.