Cristina Pividori

Autonomous University of Barcelona | UAB ·  Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Germánica

This paper analyses how borders are negotiated in Lola Arias’ Minefield/Campo Minado (2016). Arias’ representation of the war experiences and traumatic memories of six veterans, three from each side of the Malvinas/Falklands war, suggests an effort to reframe fixed categorizations around the conflict and cross temporal, spatial and aesthetic border...

Silence, Guilt and Insidious Trauma in Auden’s Early Poems The title of the book of poems published in 1941, The Double Man, defines much of W.H. Auden’s life, constantly driven by a sense of duality and paradox. The double functions as a complex, subtle phenomenon in Auden’s case: It highlights an unresolvable tension between his private and publi...

Literary theory has become such a central part of the study of literature, particularly at university level, that a solid familiarity with its basic ideas is now essential. This book will appeal to students who may find the many theoretical approaches that they encounter to be complex, highly demanding, and difficult to incorporate into their own w...

Among those who were in the trenches, the voices of the canonical war poets are still heard today. They wrote the story of the Great War that came to be known as the “truth”. Yet they provided a particular account of the truth, one that seemed to meet certain needs. Although they were victorious on the battlefield, they tended to reconceive the all...

Although the First World War has become history by now, the memory of the war continues to be repeatedly fictionalised: retrospectively inspired narratives are often regarded as more genuine and far-reaching than historical or documentary accounts in their rendition of the past. Yet, memory is creatively selective, reflecting a highly-conflicted pr...

Focussing on specific writers and texts, Writings of Persuasion and Dissonance in the Great War examines literary responses to the Great War. It underscores the futility of imposing a single perspective on such response and also enquires into the uncertainties of memory.

Among the experiences of otherness that unsettled the imperial trope of the warrior hero, this paper focuses on the representation of the coward in three autobiographical responses to the Great War. By following the traces of the malingerer, the deserter and the psychologically injured soldier in Herbert's The Secret Battle (1919), Aldington's Deat...

Drawing on some of the autobiographical narratives written by the war poets, this article focuses on the ghost not only as the clearest expression of the myth of the Great War but also as a counter-model undermining traditionally heroic patterns and unmasking certain narratives and identities that had been marginalized, excluded, or repressed. By a...

Este artículo describe los objetivos, enfoques y desarrollo del proyecto interuniversitario titulado “Entre líneas: Lectura comprensiva de textos literarios en lengua extranjera” financiado por la Agencia de Gestión de Ayudas Universitarias y de la Investigación (MQD 00121) y destinado a la mejora de la calidad docente en el ámbito de la enseñanza...

This article explores the notion of heroism in Victorian war literature by analyzing the figure of the soldier-hero in two imperial war memoirs: Captain Mowbray Thomson’s The Story of Cawnpore: The Indian Mutiny and John Pearman’s The Radical Soldier’s Tale. While The Story of Cawnpore is an emblematic example of what we call the Victorian hero myt...

Drawing on trauma theory and taking the figure of the shell-shocked soldier as my point of departure, I suggest that, unlike most of its contemporaries, the response to war trauma posed by Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier is not only an enactment of Freud's theory of the death drive but part of a peculiar experience of survival. Desire is u...

This paper describes a model for the analysis of the quality of teaching and learning in higher education. Empirically validated through an extensive student‐focused survey, this model puts forward a concept of quality that challenges that which is commonly used in institutional analysis. Research indicates that quality, rather than being a simple...

This article uses the other and the idea of othering to study male bonding and self-identification in John Pearman's The Radical Soldier's Tale. Instead of strengthening bonds of institutionalized male comradeship based on the exclusion of the Indian enemy, the radical soldier John Pearman, a working-class man who occupies positions of liminality i...

Photography plays a crucial role in Seiffert�s debut novel, The Dark Room (2001). Not only does it contribute significantly to rediscovering Germany�s traumatic past, but it also shares certain common responses with the text: the narrative of the self, the album aesthetics, memory, the anti-heroic and the notion of open work. When applied to Seiffe...