Scottish Transnational Discourse of the Great War: A Genealogy of Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” and Hugh MacDiarmid’s “At the Cenotaph”
Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online October, 2019
Scottish Transnational Discourse of the Great War: A Genealogy of Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” and Hugh MacDiarmid’s “At the Cenotaph”
A comparison of a 1971 popular song, Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” with a 1935 poem, Hugh MacDiarmid’s “At the Cenotaph,” enables this article to produce a transnational, trans-genre and trans-historical discourse analysis of memories of the Great War of 1914-1918. While an ethonosymbolic approach allows for the discovery of resemblances and continuities, Nietzschean genealogy criticizes such monumental, associative views of the past and focuses instead on the casual connections between disperse moments in time. Critical discourse analysis, in turn, offers a possible synthesis by distinguishing historical narrative structures, cultural practices (the Anzac parades and cenotaphs to honor the heroic dead), and textual events, in this case the satirical representation of the Great War in later song and poetry.
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