About the Author:
Brian Kennedy is Montreal-born and raised, and now teaches British and postcolonial literature as well as writing courses at Pasadena City College, California. He has PhD in contemporary British literature, and his previous publications include essays on Virginia Woolf, Henry James and Graham Greene, an edited book on California issues and books and academic articles on hockey and Canadian culture. He has held a research fellowship at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax; given presentations at the Bakhtin Centre at the University of Sheffield, England; and lectured on literature at colleges in Mumbai, India. His work has been translated into Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch. He is the author of Living the Hockey Dream and My Country is Hockey.
Review:
How do we remember unthinkably awful events such as the The War to End All Wars ? In this book, Kennedy weaves together trauma studies, personal testimony, and creative fiction to suggest that our obsessive retelling of its stories turns the trap of individual memory into the consolation of communication: social, shared, constantly present. If time blurs the pain but preserves the glamour of a catastrophe, then the Great War, in its many literary revivals, becomes more potent as the eyewitnesses disappear. A very good and scary study. --Caryl Emerson, Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University
Traumatic in a defining way, the Great War continually returns to haunt our sense of how to imagine the unimaginable. Brian Kennedy s excellent book offers critical readings of writers who attend both to the Great War s history and to its imaginative quandary: once the war moves beyond living memory, what exactly is being remembered, and what forgotten? Thanks to Kennedy s nuanced approach, the war s meaning for contemporary creative writing is rendered memorable in its own way. --Peter Hitchcock, Professor of English, City University of New York
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