Writers bear witness:between the wars 1919 -1939

WRITERS BEAR WITNESS: BETWEEN THE WARS 1919–1939

Dr Rohan Quince, author; Jillian Vigrass, teacher, International Baccalaureate programme

Thursday 30 January  3.00 pm  COURSE FEES R110; Staff and students R55

One hundred and five years after the Treaty of Versailles and eighty-five years since the start of World War II, we wonder how the European powers stumbled from one war into another. This lecture-performance examines the historical events and social developments of those twenty fateful years through the responses of the authors of the period.

First, reactions to the Treaty of Versailles and life in England at the end of World War I, are explored through the words of Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot. Then, the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age as described in the poetry of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance and in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which exposes the American obsession with eugenics and influences Hitler in the 1930s, are discussed. Censorship of novels by James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence is also looked at. John Steinbeck highlights the effects of the Great Depression in The Grapes of Wrath. Later in the 1930s, Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden expose the horrors of the Japanese invasion of China. The Spanish Civil War is illuminated in the poetry of Federico García Lorca and the writings of George Orwell and Albert Camus. The evils of Nazism, as exposed by Bertolt Brecht, are also explored. This presentation includes diary entries and letters written by ordinary men and women.

The historical events are presented in lecture form. The literary excerpts are performed.

TO BOOK: https://www.webtickets.co.za/v2/performance.aspx?itemid=1554767551

Dr Rohan Quince (PhD, Southern Illinois University, 1987) taught English at GeorgiaSouthern University and, since 1994, at schools in Johannesburg. He published Shakespeare in South Africa in 2000. Shows at the National Arts Festival include World War 1 Remembered and What the Dickens! He runs the Shakespeare Club at the National Children’s Theatre in Johannesburg. He co-founded Writers Bear Witness in 2019.

Jillian Vigrass Gorton (BA and STD, UCT, 1972) taught English A (Literature) and Theory of Knowledge in the International Baccalaureate, teaching in Ethiopia, Portugal and Switzerland. She also taught in state schools in South Africa, Zimbabwe and the UK. Her writing includes a play, Chimurenga Children, and an educational children’s story about malaria, Ozzee the Dozy Mozzee. She co-founded Writers Bear Witness in 2019.