A Word Is a Sword, by Arham

The word kills more than the sword.. Echoing the sense of this universal old adage, in 1908 Gandhi went so far as to claim: «To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them». Now the bell is tolling for 90% of the world’s languages and cultures, threatened above all by English, and the old adage is more relevant than ever. The War of Languages is now a much more concrete and terrible reality than the widely-feared war of religions between the Christian and Islamic cultures. Much more concrete and terrible not only because the heritage at stake is much greater in numerical terms than that of religions, but above all because the War of Languages, unlike wars of religion, does not aim to change your moral values and customs but your way of thinking, the instrument of your thoughts. [...]

A Preface to War and Words: Representations of Military Conflict in Literature and the Media (eds. Wojciech Drąg, Jakub Krogulec and Mateusz Marecki, 2016)

Journal of English Language and Literature

This paper presents a survey of literature written in response to wars throughout the world. The paper argues that plays, poems, memoirs and novels have been written to celebrate combatants as heroes; war literature has also been written to overcome the trauma of war while other literature has been written to underscore the effects of war and to speak out against wars. The paper also discusses the rationale for studying war literature and argues that as creative expression, literature allows us, through the imagined world of the author, to identify social trends and structures that shape the world, in particular, the factors that lead to and sustain conflict, as well as experiences of war and its long term individual and general effects. Also, literature's aesthetic quality and its capacity to engage its audience makes it easier to transmit war time experience, and hopefully the wisdom gained from that experience, from one generation to another.

The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War, edited by Todd K. Shackelford and Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford , 2012

Literature depicts emotions arising from conflict and makes them available to readers, who experience them vicariously. Literary meaning lodges itself not in depicted events alone but also, and more importantly, in the interpretation of depicted events: in the author's treatment of the depicted events; the reader's response to both the depicted events and the author's treatment; and the author's anticipation of the reader's responses. This chapter outlines possible stances toward violence, makes an argument for the decisive structural significance of violence in both life and literature, and then presents a representative sampling of violent acts in literature. The examples from literature are organized into the main kinds of human relationships: one's relation to oneself (suicide); sexual rivals, lovers, and marital partners; family members (parents, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins); communities (violence within social groups); and warfare (violence between social groups).

THE RUBRICS Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2022

War is one of the major social problems facing the world today. War has plagued humanity since time immemorial. Many countries have to go through this experience at some point in their lives. It can cause great emotional trauma and grief to those left behind by the dead. Experiences and emotions related to war have always inspired poetry, prose and literary music. War literature often provokes strong reactions. War literature is powerful. War literature can provoke emotions that some would like those emotions should not to enter. This became clear after World War I when some people felt that certain war materials would affect the government's ability to persuade civilians to take up arms. This paper is an attempt at a study of the dark reality of the war in selected war poems by Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas.

2023

No poem ever stopped a tank. Such are the words one can hear not only in poetry seminars. This opinion, though true, merits questioning. Despite its apparent harmless nature, poetry can be used as a powerful tool of propaganda, galvanization, an instrument of contest or a call for peace. It is one of the goals of this paper to uncover different uses – and the good or bad – of poetry (Heaney 5) and literary texts, may it be in reality or fiction, but always in the context of conflict and/or war. Poetry can have a political function of which various examples arise. Some of Seamus Heaney’s poetry serves as a way of remembering and or giving closure to various tragic events, Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko’s2 works carried a nationalistic meaning and have gone under a certain resurrection in the contemporary conflict between Russia and Ukraine, more precisely in the Ukrainian propaganda system. Thus, not only will this paper try to list and exemplify the good of poetry in the context of crisis, but also compare different authors regarding their use of poetry. One main source which will be used to compare various works is; Seamus Heaney’s “100 poems”, and more precisely, the “poetry of fire” which it contains. “Poetry of fire” is a concept which will be used to define Heaney’s poems that share similar aspects. Those aspects are as follows: The poems are about a historical catastrophe – sometimes fictional or legendary –, they are a response to those events and their shared themes are heroism, hope and justice. Thus, this essay will also look for literary responses to violence and/or conflict. One can notice that the use of poetry regarding conflictual events can widely vary in its functions. Poetry can itself take sides in a conflict, can be used or deformed for a political purpose, it can help to immortalize tragic events and make people come to terms with difficult past situations.

Orbis Litterarum, 2017

reference to George Eliot's essays and her other novels is limited. There are occasions when such reference might have given force and concreteness to the argument. Thus, when the double narrative of the novel is described in terms of two basic types of "machinic configuration" marked by two different forms of timetime as a force of contingency and time as a force of order, unity, and stability (3)the point could have been usefully clarified by reference to the same distinction George Eliot graphically illustrates in The Mill on the Floss by drawing a contrast between the landscapes of the Rhône and the Rhine and the different versions of time and history that they imply. Ungelenk displays a fluent command of a contemporary form of critical discourse, with all its characteristic traits of words under erasure and use of bracketed syllablesas in "spec(tac)ularityand his English generally is serviceable, though with some awkwardness of expression here and there and an occasional uncertainty in the use of prepositions. The obsolete adjective "influent" is used instead of the normal "influential", and the name of Gwendolen's early home, "Offendene", is misprinted as "Offende". The range of material brought to bear on the text is impressive though sometimes frustrating, as the proliferating allusions and rapid shuttling between different applications of theory often tend to obscure a clear line of argument. This study will appeal primarily to readers interested in critical theory and a highly theorized form of critical discourse, while those whose main interest is insight into George Eliot's novel will have to work hard for their rewards.

Fortnight, 2001

This is a review of a radical 200-page book by a literate, war-correspondent who reviews the intoxicating effects of war on the various conflicts that he personally saw in his 15 years of the modern madness of civil wars that have broken out in Central America, the Balkans and Iraq. Hedges exposes the lies and deceits that trigger these fratricidal and ethnic conflicts that are exploited by thugs and gangsters for their personal gratifications. He knows that "War is Hell" as he has been there many times during the first half of his life. He argues that war seduces entire societies, creating fictions that the public believes and relies on to continue to support conflicts. He also describes how those who experience war may find it exhilarating and addictive. Indeed: "war's seduction and inevitability and sometimes even necessity" are a recurring theme in this book. He describes the negative impacts of war on injured societies. He convincingly proves that war is the worst human behavior that can overtake a society. As a literate intellectual, he is able to give first-hand descriptions of the immediate feelings that arise when first exposed to direct, life-threatening violence. Although he claims that he wrote the book "not to dissuade us from war but to understand it, so that Americans, who wield such massive force across the globe, see within ourselves the seeds of our own obliteration." He contrasts the visceral immediacy of existential situations with the bland, dullness of modern life that makes war so attractive an adventure for too many men. He calls on his classical education to illustrate the long history of violence that has seduced warriors and professional soldiers for far too long.

Language in Society, 2005

but also create "texture" -that is, cohesion -by encouraging the reader to construct a connected narrative. Thus, after Massacre, we find cross-references to Collateral damage, Genocide, Murder,[9][10][11] and War, some of which might seem to follow naturally from the theme of "massacre," others more tendentiously so. (Collateral damage might bring us back to "euphemism," though this topic is not discussed in its own right in the text.)