As the world acknowledges the 100th anniversary of World War I this year, the UO Department of English will host an event Friday, Nov. 21, that looks at new analyses of literature stemming from the Great War.

“The Literature of World War One: A Centennial Symposium” Will be held in the Gerlinger Alumni Lounge. It is free and open to the public.

The symposium will examine the literature of WWI, as many authors of the time continue to shape military and wartime writings today. Seven scholars on conflict literature will provide insight at the symposium.

“For the most part, this was the first war for western Europeans which had been fought by highly literate civilian soldiers,” said Mark Whalan, a professor of English at the UO who is scheduled to speak at the event. “The sense of despair and being locked into a huge bureaucratic institution that expected many of them to die was relatively new for this class of people, but that is still the way we see writings about war today.”

Claire Buck of Wheaton College, Patricia Rae of Queen’s University, Paul Peppis from the UO, Steven Trout from the University of South Alabama and Mark van Wienen of Northern Illinois University will join Whalan as speakers at the event. Each speaker is a noted author and scholar of WWI literature, ranging in focus from colonial soldiers to the way the literature of this era influenced later world conflicts.

“American writers like Ernest Hemingway and E. E. Cummings were volunteer ambulance drivers in WWI, and they arrived to see a civilization which had completely changed,” Whalan said. “They wrote about what kind of a world this war left us in.”

The morning session, from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., will focus on British literature. Following a lunch, the afternoon session is from 2:30 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. and will concentrate on fiction and poetry by American authors.

“It’s surprising how little this war is being commemorated,” Whalan said. “I think this type of literature — whether it’s about a soldier’s complete disconnect from family back home or facing a traumatic experience on the frontlines — is something people should know about.”

—By Nathaniel Brown, Public Affairs Communication