Transmission as Fabrication in Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock (1981) and Wish You Were Here (2011)
For Graham Swift, as for many authors of the immediate post-World War II generation, transmitting memories and stories of the past—especially of the two world wars but also more recently, the Iraq war—to the next generations, especially as those who lived them are dying out, is part of a writer’s du...
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| Publicado en: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| Autor Principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2024
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| Acceso en liña: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | For Graham Swift, as for many authors of the immediate post-World War II generation, transmitting memories and stories of the past—especially of the two world wars but also more recently, the Iraq war—to the next generations, especially as those who lived them are dying out, is part of a writer’s duty of remembrance. Thus most of his novels are about or at least include ex-servicemen whose lives have been obliquely or directly shaped by their wartime experiences and/or ordinary people who have been traumatized one way or another by the war. However, as Swift said in an interview with Marc Porée it is also up to the novelists to debunk some of the ‘glorious myths’ transmitted by family members or by the army, for example, when facts or events are deliberately or unwittingly falsified. I shall examine here a few examples of these faulty transmissions that the novelist deals with, focusing more specifically on Shuttlecock (1981) and Wish You Were Here (2011). |
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