Scanlon Shares Paper on Great War Literature

Mara Scanlon, Professor of English, recently participated in the seminar “WW I: Reconsidering Rupture” at the 17th Annual Modernist Studies Association Conference. Her paper, “Mary Borden’s ‘Moonlight’: ‘A Crazy Hurting Dream,'” focused on the experimental war book The Forbidden Zone, written by Mary Borden, an American civilian who ran a hospital unit behind the front lines in World War I.  The paper theorized the traumatic encounter with beauty, defined as an “abraded adjacency” in a revision of Elaine Scarry’s terminology from On Beauty and Being Just, which can shock the self from its protective mechanization in a time of violence. The Forbidden Zone is also included in Scanlon’s English class called Literature of the Great War.