Epistemology of Pain: The Glorification of Suffering in the Literary Aftermath of World War I

Abstract

World War I’s most canonized literary depictions emphasize the conflict’s dehumanizing violence, its ceaseless anguish, and its meaningless slaughter. Contemporaneous critics and prominent authors deemed such depictions “realistic” not merely because they represented the war experience faithfully, but also to serve a moral purpose: war literature in World War I’s aftermath had to be anti-war literature. By emphasizing the brutalizing experience of suffering in the war, authors and critics thought that a public and unknowing audience would understand conflict's atrocity and unshackle themselves of any inherited romantic notions of war experience. Yet this straightforward calculation had unintended, and indeed ironic, consequences. This dissertation argues that, in privileging suffering over all other aspects of war experience, the post-war literary community conceptualized the anguished combatant as the knowledgeable educator, and therefore suffering as a knowledge producing experience. Suffering signaled wisdom; anguish meant authority. Having-suffered became not only the barrier to entry into the war-literature market, but also the ticket to a higher moral and intellectual plane. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that post-war critical consensus glorified the suffering it set out to condemn.