Abstract
‘I wish to enter a protest against the use of the Trojan Women or any other Greek tragedy as a means of furthering a peace movement, raising money for the Red Cross, or stirring up sentiment for any specific cause, however worthy’, it is stated in a complaint to The English Journal’s ‘Round Table’ section in 1915.1 ‘These great expressions of Greek genius’, the author continues,
have a message of their own which is of infinitely greater moment to the world than even the European war. To use them as mere instruments of propaganda is a crime against art. It is almost like robbing the sheeted dead. […] The Greek figures were hopelessly overlaid by visions of bursting shrapnel in the Carpathians and Cossack raids in Eastern Prussia. Why should anyone be allowed to deface these lovely glimpses of the antique world by spraying over them an ill-smelling tincture of modernity? (Balaustion 1915: 398)
Chapter PDF
Notes
Hutcheon refers to Gérad Genette, Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degrée (Paris: Editions du Seul, 1982), 5.
Hutcheon here refers to Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 242–3.
Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993).
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Copyright information
© 2013 Julia Boll
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Boll, J. (2013). Palimpsest. In: The New War Plays. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330024_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330024_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46080-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-33002-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Theatre & Performance CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)