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Without leaving campus, faculty and students from California State University, Los Angeles, the University of Glasgow and Royal Holloway, University of London met for Dramas and Trauma: Writers Responding to War this October. This academic gathering was held through the medium of video-conference and explored conflict, trauma and national identity through literature, using Black Watch as a central text.
The National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch is a leading example of contemporary artistic responses which are beginning to emerge from the current conflict in Iraq. These sorts of participant reactions to the war and its after-effects have a long literary heritage.
Although contemporary playwrights have produced successful reportage-based drama (Jonathan Holmes’s Fallujah, David Hare’s Stuff Happens) in response to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, in contrast to past wars such as Vietnam there has not yet been a clear literary response from contemporary poets and authors. Novels like Ian McEwan’s Saturday are tangential exceptions.
The aim of this conference is to explore Black Watch and other traumatic war narratives (from fiction, poetry, performance and other genres) in a literary context. How do the complexities of the current war contrast to previous accounts? What differences and similarities are there in traumatic representations? Are there national divergences of interpretation?
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