1. Why are World Wars I and II called “total wars”?
The Great War of 1914, as WWI was called, and WWII, which followed in 1939, are called “total” not only because they involved more nations than had ever before engaged in armed combat, but because they killed – along with military personnel – large number of civilians. Further, they were total in the sense that they were fought with a “no holds barred” attitude – all methods of destruction were utilized in the name of conquest.
2. What images in the poems by Owen, Yeats, Jarell, and Shuson best capture the sense of despair and range felt by the poets?
In his poem, Owen stating how is it was in war. According to his poem, Dulce Et Decorum Est, he wrote how the soldiers are like old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed, coughing like hags and how they cursed through sludge. He’s saying how hard they’re doing while they are at the war. Yeats responded to the violence of WWI with the apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming”. The title of the poem alludes both to the long-awaited second coming of Jesus and to the nameless force that, in Yeats’ view, threatened to enthrall the world in darkness.
3. What is the difference between “social realism” and “socialist”? Cite example of each.
Socialist Realism condemned all manifestations of “Modernism” as “bourgeois decadence”. The congress called upon Soviet artists to create “a true, historically concrete portrayal of reality in its revolutionary development.” Artists were instructed to communicate simply and directly, to shun all forms of decadent (that is, modern) Western art, and to describe only the positive aspects of socialist society. Thus the arts served to reinforce in the public mind the ideological benefits of communism. Socialist realism and the philosophy of art as mass propaganda lent support to almost every
