Book contents
- Modernist Empathy
- Modernist Empathy
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustration
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Modernizing Empathy, Locating Loss
- Chapter 2 Disorientation, Elegy, and the Uncanny
- Chapter 3 Disorienting Empathy
- Chapter 4 Elegizing Empathy
- Chapter 5 Uncanny Empathy
- Conclusion Performing Empathy?
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 3 - Disorienting Empathy
World War I and the Traumas of Perspective-Taking
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 June 2019
- Modernist Empathy
- Modernist Empathy
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustration
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Modernizing Empathy, Locating Loss
- Chapter 2 Disorientation, Elegy, and the Uncanny
- Chapter 3 Disorienting Empathy
- Chapter 4 Elegizing Empathy
- Chapter 5 Uncanny Empathy
- Conclusion Performing Empathy?
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Wandering through the Newfoundland Memorial in the Beaumont-Hamel area of the Somme – a site where 733 members of a Canadian regiment were killed on July 1, 1916 – produces a distanced but evocative understanding of the experience of trench warfare. Closely shorn grass covers the battlefield now, but it follows the contours of a landscape that is still alien in its shape. The tended ground eerily recalls Carl Sandburg’s war poem, “Grass”: “Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. / Shovel them under and let me work – / I am the grass; I cover all.” 1 Under this superficial cover of green, the pockmarked land bears witness to the massive destruction that took place a century ago. Hills that would have seemed innocuous or even picturesque have become ominous monuments to the strategic disadvantages of the Canadian position.
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- Modernist EmpathyGeography, Elegy, and the Uncanny, pp. 70 - 110Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019