HOFSTRA CULTURAL CENTER
presents a symposium

ARTISTIC EXPRESSIONS AND THE GREAT WAR:
A Hundred Years On

To mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War, this interdisciplinary conference proposes to explore the impact of total war on the arts from a transnational perspective, including attention to the Ottoman Empire and colonial territories.

We are defining arts broadly – literature, performing arts, visual arts and media, including film, propaganda and other mass mediated forms. World War I was the matrix on which all subsequent violence of the 20th century was forged. The war took millions of lives, led to the fall of four empires, established new nations, and negatively affected others. During and after the war, individuals and communities struggled to find expression for their wartime encounters and communal as well as individual mourning. Throughout this time of enormous upheaval, many artists redefined their place in society, among them writers, performers, painters and composers. Some sought to renew or re-establish their place in the postwar climate, while others longed for an irretrievable past, and still others tried to break with the past entirely. This conference explores the ways that artists contributed to wartime culture – both representing and shaping it – as well as the ways in which wartime culture influenced artistic expressions. Artists’ places within and against reconstruction efforts illuminate the struggles of the day.

We seek to examine how they dealt with the experience of conflict and mourning and their role in re-establishing creative traditions in the changing climate of the interwar years.

The keynote address will be given by Sarah Cole, Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature and dean of Humanities at Columbia University. A specialist in literary modernism, she is the co-founder of the NYNJ Modernism Seminar. She is the author of two books, At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (Oxford, Modernist Literature and Culture series, 2012) and Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge, 2003), and has published articles in journals such as PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Modernist Cultures, Modern Fiction Studies, and ELH, and in edited collections. She is currently completing a book, forthcoming from Columbia University Press, that reassesses the under-appreciated career of H. G. Wells. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013-14.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
Dix, Otto (1891-1969) © ARS, NY
Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor (Storm Troops Advance under Gas Attack) from Der Krieg (The War). (1924).
Etching, aquatint and drypoint, plate: 7 5/8 x 11 5/16” (19.3 x 28.8 cm); sheet: 13 11/16 x 18 5/8” (34.8 x 47.3 cm).
Publisher: Karl Nierendorf, Berlin. Printer: Otto Felsing, Berlin. Edition: 70. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.