Speaking of Grief: Death and Language in Modernism (MSA 11, 5-8 November 2009, Montréal, Québec, Canada)
If the Holocaust motivated aesthetic theorists and writers to rethink the premise of the literary mode altogether, stated in one form by Theodore Adorno in his 1951 claim that to write "poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," early-twentieth-century writers tended to respond to the most violent and rife deaths of their time by zeroing in on words themselves. We may find the most prominent meeting of fatality and diction in the modernist period in attacks on languages of militarism and commemoration launched from a host of quarters, in particular by ex-servicemen following the Great War.