Ashford 4: – Week 3 – Discussion
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Ashford 4: – Week 3 – Discussion
Discussion
By Day 1 of the week, your instructor will post a discussion question. Respond to your instructor’s question and to your classmates’ responses. The goal of this discussion forum is to have a single conversation about the topic, not a series of 30 separate conversations. This means that every post should be in response to another post. Only start a new thread if you want to address a whole different theme within the topic, and only post after first carefully reading what others have written. Do not repeat what your classmates have already said, and do not ignore them if they ask you questions. Try to keep the conversation moving forward.
Attend discussion on at least four separate days, and post a total of 800 words. There is no required word count for individual posts as long as all your posts together total 800 words. Nor is there a minimum number of posts, but you must post on at least four separate days by Day 7.
Carefully review the Discussion Forum Grading Rubric for the criteria that will be used to evaluate this Discussion Thread.
Responses
Responses are listed below in the following order: response, author and the date and time the response is posted.
Response
Author
Date/Time
(an instructor response)
Week 3 Discussion
Instructor Umansky
6/3/2016 1:34:21 PM
Discussion for Week 3. Initial post of 350-400 words due Thursday, day 3, and at least three responses that will comprise another 400 words to total 800 words. That means, each response to a peer needs to be a minimum of a paragraph to meet this requirement. You must post on four different days, which is a post a day. In your initial post, continue from my initial thread and use textual evidence with proper citations whether from the novel or from the Assmann article.
Reading: All Quiet on the Western Front, (Ch. 1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 12 (p. 1-8, 19-28, 51-86, and 109-110 in the online edition)
Discussion: In the preface to All Quiet on the Western Front, novelist Erich Maria Remarque says, “This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the way.” Throughout his novel, Remarque emphasizes the way that war transformed its participants and made it impossible for them to return to normal life. Hence historian Modris Eksteins argues that “All Quiet is more a comment on the postwar mind, on the postwar view of the war, than an attempt to reconstruct the reality of the trench experience” (see his essay “Memory” in Critical Insights: All Quiet on the Western Front, p. 142 — available in Ashford’s library, through the “Literary Reference Center”). In other words, the novel is about how the memory of war haunts ex-soldiers, but it is also about how the memory of war haunts the broader society. Discuss the theme of the war’s effect on soldiers. What exactly does war do to soldiers, as Remarque portrays it? Cite specific passages from the novel to support your interpretation. What is role do war memories play in constructing soldiers’ post-war identities? Once you have a clear understanding of the soldiers’ case, expand your discussion to society in general. How does a culture’s war memories affect collective identity?
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