Languages of war: How Italian combat officers wrote about the great war 1915-1918

Abstract

An investigation of the impact of the war experience on language, mentalities and writing activity through the analysis of fifteen war writings, including diaries and letter collections. The content, style, writing attitudes and identity projections of these sources are explored as traces of the transformation provoked by war at both an individual and collective level. The comparative analysis of officers' writings sheds light on the role of writing in war, on its connection with the experience of war, and on its impact on subsequent memories of war. Attention is also directed to a few central themes: communication with the family, the complex sense of belonging to the nation and to the army, the identity challenge represented by war and the responses resulting from it and detectable also in officers' writing attitudes. The first three chapters deal with language and mentalities; chapter four investigates the theme of the obsolescence of legal norms and with the transformation of what is conceived as 'fair' at war. From chapter five onwards, the investigation on landscape, combat and Caporetto, the thesis focuses on the specific impact of life in the trenches, combat and trauma on the perception, renegotiation and description of space, on the representation of traumatic events and on the complex features characterizing the act of witnessing in a moment of collective and individual trauma such as that represented by the Rout of Caporetto. In order to provide an idea of the public discourse preceding the Rout, a selection of articles from a local newspaper and publications have been investigated in close connection with the letters and notebooks analyzed and with the discourse on the demonization of the enemy through the narratives on atrocities. Attention is also devoted to the retrospective renegotiation (at the time, fabrication) of identity in response to trauma (as is the case with the memoir by Carlo Emilio Gadda).