Pedagogy Oct 2017 Open Access

Beyond Pacifism

Joyce Wexler

Abstract

The military historian Yuval Noah Harari accounts for the enduring allure of war by calling attention to a change in soldiers' memoirs that occurred in the mid-eighteenth century. Soldiers began to describe how they felt rather than what they did. Harari introduces the term flesh-witnessing to distinguish inner experience from eyewitness testimony. Flesh-witnesses speak of combat as a transformative and indescribable experience comparable to the sublime. This view is often attributed to militarists, but Harari shows that it also motivates pacifists. Even antiwar arguments like those of Erich Maria Remarque are based on the authority of the flesh-witness. To test Harari's claims, I invited ROTC officers to speak to students enrolled in a course titled British Literature: The Twentieth Century about their military experience. The juxtaposition of Harari's research and the officers' comments provided a framework for teaching All Quiet on the Western Front and other texts about war. Whether war is portrayed as painful or exhilarating, degrading or ennobling, it is widely idealized as a crucible for the development of the self. This view makes war stories irresistible, whatever political views writers and readers may hold.

Journal
Pedagogy
Published
2017-10-01
DOI
10.1215/15314200-3975655
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Open Access
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Topics
teacher development literary studies
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References (7)

  1. Eksteins (1980)
    “All Quiet on the Western Front and the Fate of a War.”
    Journal of Contemporary History  ↗
  2. Harari (2008)
    The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 14…
     ↗
  3. (2009)
    “Scholars, Eyewitnesses, and Flesh-Witnesses of War: A Tense Relationship.”
    Partial Answers  ↗
  4. Hemingway (2012)
    A Farewell to Arms
  5. Hynes (1990)
    A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture
Show all 7 →
  1. Pois (2000)
    “The Great War and the Holocaust.”
  2. Todman (2005)
    The Great War: Myth and Memory
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