Goldclass: All this stench: Corpses in the Literature of the Great War

Many soldiers of the Great War were regularly exposed to the smell of dead bodies; in literature, the combatants’ disturbing experience of close proximity to corpses is often presented as a threat to the self’s boundaries, or as a deprivation of indispensable burial rites.

The lecture will focus on the lesser known literary method of charging the stench of decomposition with symbolic meaning supposed to reveal the cultural significance of death in war.