Week 4 Discussion Part 1

Prior to beginning work on this discussion forum,

• Review the following chapters in your course textbook Historical Contexts and Literature:
• Chapter 6: World War II (1939-1945)
• Chapter 7: The Cold War (1945-1991)
• Review the following assigned literary works:
• Tamiki Hara, “
• ” (1947)
• Paul Celan, “
• ” (1948)
• Philip K. Dick,
• (1953)
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “
• ” (1974)
• Review the Week 4 Infographic:

This week, you have read the following literary works in your textbook or in your online classroom, which were written in the aftermath of World War II and during the period known as the Cold War:

• Tamiki Hara, “
• ” (1947)
• Paul Celan, “
• ” (1948)
• Elie Wiesel, excerpt from Night (1958)
• Philp K. Dick,
• (1953)
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “
• ” (1974)

At the end of World War II, writers struggled with how to depict and document horrors, such as the Holocaust in Europe and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Paul Celan, who survived a Soviet labor camp, gave voice to his experience and the experiences of those who did not survive the war through surreal, fragmented poetry. As you read his work Death Fugue, consider Celans use of the word fugue in his title. A fugue is a style of musical composition in which one or two themes are repeated through interweaving voices. What are Celans themes? What are the voices that weave together through the poem?

Elie Wiesel, on the other hand, described his experience of capture by the Nazis and imprisonment in Auschwitz through the genre of memoir. Wiesel sets his readers in the middle of specific scenes through first-person narration. Whereas Wiesels work is easier to read and grasp as you review the Holocaust through his eyes, Celans work provides fragments of images that haunt the imagination, lending an overall impression of the horrors of the war.

As one of the few Japanese writers to survive the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and document his experience, Tamiki Hara also used the memoir genre. Compared to Wiesels Night, Haras Summer Flowers is more lyrical, as his careful descriptions of setting serve to highlight the desolation of a city turned to ash.

The Cold War era fueled fiction genres, such as the spy novel and science-fiction, as writers sought to capture, and even romanticize, the anxieties resulting from the arms and space races between the United States and the Soviet Union. Philip K. Dicks fiction provides an example of Cold War themes re-imagined in the sci-fi genre. Dicks work is still popular today; you may be familiar with the Netflix series The Man in the High Castle, which is based on Dicks novel of the same name. In contrast to the genre of science-fiction, the stories and essays of Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn document his lived experience in a Soviet gulag, a punishment for criticizing the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin. His essay Live Not By Lies challenges readers to stand up to the lies of a ruthless regime.

In this discussion forum, you will consider the significance of genre when analyzing how a literary work reflects its historical context. You will examine how two of the literary works you read this week use the conventions of genre to capture memory and anxiety. In addition, you will continue to think about the notion of cultural memory, and how different genres contribute to cultural memory and identity in unique ways.

In your initial posting:

• Identify the genres of the two literary works you have chosen and what you see as the conventions or characteristics of each genre (e.g. the literary devices that you examined in the Week 1 Close Reading Analysis interactive may be helpful here).
• Discuss how each genre captures the historical moment or context in a unique way. What can one genre enable the writer to do that another cant?
• Assess how each work contributes to a specific cultural memory and the role of genre in creating that memory.

Be sure to refer to specific examples (scenes, passages, quotes) from each literary work in your discussion. Once again, the method of close-reading analysis that you learned in Week 1 can be helpful here.

Your initial post is due by Day 3 and must be at least 400 words in length.

Guided Response

Respond to two or more of your classmates posts by Day 7. Your responses should be substantive, at least 150 words, and provide comments and questions that further the conversation. Assist your classmates in identifying the different conventions or characteristics of the literary genres read this week. Review your classmates observations of how different genres capture historical and cultural memory in unique ways and add your own observations. Engage in a conversation with at least one classmate who chose different literary works than you. Share any observations that help you to understand the literary works better.