As the next Brexit deadline looms ever closer (at time of writing 31 October 2019, but watch this space), perhaps this is a good moment to take a step back and ask a more fundamental question: what was Britain doing in the European Union in the first place? Of course, …
Remembering D-Day The sixth of June 2019 marked the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy and what is often regarded as the beginning of the end of the liberation of Europe on the Western Front. To mark the occasion several hundred D-Day veterans, mainly in their nineties, and …
Introduction: being lost The idea that the Great War produced a ‘lost generation’ of disillusioned and deeply traumatised men, probably represents the cornerstone of the Myth of the War.[1] According to the Myth, this was the generation, born mainly at the end of the Victorian era, who marched naively off …
Introduction: a war imagined In the introduction to his book on the First World War and English Culture Samuel Hynes briefly but succinctly summaries what he calls the Myth of the War: A brief sketch of that collective narrative of significance would go something like this: a generation of innocent …
In a number of writings I have made reference to Samuel Hynes’ idea of the ‘Myth of the War’.[1] By this term he was referring to the way the events of the First World War (the Great War) have been reworked through art, literature, poetry, film, and by historical narratives …
The word is the murder of the thing If the word is indeed the murder of the thing, as Lacan argues in Seminar One, then history is surely death on an industrial scale.[1] By this I mean that history, as narrative, takes lived experience and turns it into a set …
Brexit, Nationalism and Psychoanalysis Brexit Day (originally scheduled for 29 March 2019) has come and gone, and not only is Britain still a member of the European Union, but opinion in the country seems as divided as ever regarding the referendum and what it meant (and still means). Therefore it …
The Great War and its Aftermath A hundred years on the Great War still casts its shadow over our society, and in some ways, even more so over mainland Europe. The legacy of the war was not only the collapse of empires, but also the rise of new ones – …
In a recent post I introduced Jeffery Alexander’s idea of cultural trauma which occurs when members of a social group feel they have been subjected to an horrendous event, which changes their sense of group consciousness, memory and future identity in a fundamental and irrevocable way. What’s critical to note …
In my previous post on Brexit I made reference to what Samuel Hynes has described as the ‘Myth of the (Great) War’. This is the now widely accepted idea that one of the main legacies of the First World War was a lost, disillusioned and traumatised generation for whom all …