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English 12

Unit 6

Modern and Postcolonial Literature

6 topics · 24 practice questions · Free responseNot yet reviewed

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Notes

World War I poetry

  • Brooke ("The Soldier," 1914) expressed idealistic patriotism. Owen ("Dulce et Decorum Est") showed the horror of gas and trench life and called the idea that dying for one's country is glorious "the old Lie."

Modernism

  • Modernists broke from tradition with fragmentation, free verse, allusion and stream of consciousness, responding to war and rapid change.
  • Yeats ("The Second Coming"): "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Eliot (Prufrock, The Waste Land): disillusionment and a numb modern life. Woolf and Joyce explore inner thought.

Postcolonial literature

  • Postcolonial writers examine the effects of empire: identity, language, resistance and hybridity. Many write back to colonial texts by giving voice to the colonized, as in Achebe's response to Conrad and Rhys's retelling of Jane Eyre.

Topics in this unit

Each topic has its own short notes and practice.

Practice

Which poem's tone is most likely to be bitter and critical of war?
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" most clearly reflects which modernist concern?
Which technique follows a character's thoughts as they arise, with sudden jumps in time?
Why is "write back" a useful idea in postcolonial studies?
A narrator recalls being forced to use a new name at school and says her old name "stayed home." The best interpretation is:
T. S. Eliot's simile of the evening "like a patient etherised upon a table" is notable because it:

Free response

Write your answer first, then open the scoring guide.

Free-response question

Read these lines from Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" (1920): "My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori."

(a) In plain words, what is "the old Lie" that Owen refers to?

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The old Lie is the claim that it is sweet and fitting (glorious) to die for one's country.

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(b) What is Owen's attitude toward the people who tell the Lie to young people? Use a detail from the lines.

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He is angry and bitter. The phrase "with such high zest" shows he thinks they speak eagerly about something they do not understand, and "children ardent for some desperate glory" shows he thinks they mislead the young.

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(c) Explain how this view differs from the attitude toward war in Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier."

Show the answer and scoring guide

Brooke's poem, written early in the war, treats dying for England as noble and comforting, imagining a foreign field becoming a part of England. Owen, writing from later war experience, rejects that glory and calls it a lie.

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