1.1 Introduction War memorials are artefacts which commemorate loss – of individuals, armies or battalions – in war and have particular symbolic meaning and form. We could define texts as ‘things that people have made or produce Learning outcomes By the end of this unit you should have: an understanding of ‘texts’ that is not restricted to the written word; an understanding of war memorials as text; a basic ability to interpret a visual text. References 5 Function of a memorial We could, of course, extend this notion of appropriateness into other forms of civic building. If I had asked you to consider your local town hall, shopping centre or supermarket, we could have asked many of the same questions about function and appropriateness. We expect a shopping centre to be organised so that shopping and spending money are easy. If it is not well organised, we might go elsewhere. We expect civic offices to be accessible and central to the area they serve; and we are anno 4 Form of memorial I now want you to think about the form of ‘your’ war memorial. I don't think you will have had any difficulty in knowing what to look for when I asked you whether you had a memorial near to you, and where it was. You may have had to think about the question, and search for the memorial, but you knew what you were looking for. 3.2 Public or private memorial? The choice of location has wider implications, too. If the chosen site is in a public place, such as a park or village green in public ownership, then the building is accessible to all. No specific interest controls it (though of course there may be special arrangements made for its upkeep) and no particular individual owns it. On the other hand, if a memorial is created by a family in memory of an individual, then the location of the memorial reflects that gift. Such memorials are ofte 3.1 Introduction Let us take up the question of the location of the war memorial. I am going to give you a list of places in which I would expect you to find your war memorial: 2 The need to commemorate The subject of memorial is a good one. People often have a powerful need to commemorate those who have died. They may have lost someone close to them, or they may be thinking about loss of life in disaster, or war. You may well recognise that feeling. Such memorials take different forms, from flowers left at a particular spot, to public triumphal arches and works of art dedicated to the memory of specific individuals. But to begin, we want to focus on a particular form of remembrance – war 1 War memorial and commemoration In this unit you will have an opportunity to practise good study techniques using a framework within which to use them. Obviously, since you are shortly to begin your study of a range of disciplines, it will make sense to use a framework, or theme, that is relevant to the arts as a whole. The theme we have selected is that of commemoration and memorials. Studying this unit will give you the experience of looking at, and thinking about, ideas that form the study of the humanities. At poi Learning outcomes By the end of this unit you should have: an awareness of the processes of study in the arts and humanities an understanding of key concepts in the arts and humanities. Introduction This unit gives you the opportunity to practise good study techniques using the theme of commemoration and memorials. It will help you to begin to think about how form influences meaning in the arts and how ideas influence approaches to the humanities. This material is from our archive and is an adapted extract from An introduction to the humanities (A103) which is no longer taught by The Open University. If you want to study formally with us, you may wish to explore other cours Acknowledgements This unit was written by Dr Nicola Watson
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reprodu References 9 What the world said – or, the politics of the exotic So far we have mostly been concerned with the making of the Pavilion, treating it as a product of the confluence between the prince's virtuoso taste, his fluctuating reserves of cash and his patronage of the talents of a series of architects and designers, especially John Nash. We have also remarked in passing that the flamboyant idiosyncrasy of the Pavilion seems to be attributable in large part to the prince's nostalgia for absolutism, expressed in an era of constitutional monarchy and seem 6 The Pavilion and the picturesque Nash's evocation of the picturesque as an aesthetic to describe the projected exterior for the Pavilion is striking. If neoclassical Palladian houses had stood four-square in the landscape, rising up out of extensive lawns and commanding an elaborately naturalistic landscape of grazing sheep and cattle to the horizon diversified by an ornamental lake, the picturesque house was instead enfolded within and extended by its garden. Repton and Nash, in partnership from 1796 to 1802, were two 4 ‘Chinese’ on the inside Our evidence for the evolution of the Pavilion's interiors is largely derived from Augustus Pugin's watercolours of the building's interiors and exteriors, executed for a picture-book commissioned around 1820 by the house-proud prince from his architect John Nash, entitled Views of the Royal Pavilion, completed in 1826. On the whole, the Pavilion today has been restored to congruence with the Views, to appear as it did in 1823 when the building was finished. Let's now look at th 2 A prince at the seaside In this section we will take a closer look at the life of George IV and what brought him to Brighton. The Prince of Wales (see Figure 2), known familiarly to his friends as ‘Prinny’, was born in 1762 and destined to become Prince Regent in 1811 following the onset of the madness of his father, George III. He finally became George 6 Further reading For a more advanced introduction to the topic of consciousness, which includes an historical survey of philosophical and psychological work on the topic and a survey of recent debates, see: Güzeldere, G. (1997) ‘The many faces of consciousness: a field guide’, in N. Block, O. Flanagan and G. Güzeldere (eds), The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, pp. 1–67. (The collection in which this essay appears is a useful one, which reprints 4.5 The function of consciousness There is another problem I want to mention briefly. What is the function of consciousness? What difference does it make to have phenomenally conscious experiences? This may seem an odd question. Surely, the answer is obvious: the function of consciousness is to provide us with information about our environment – about colours, shapes, sounds and so on. But this is too swift. We do not need to have conscious experiences in order to acquire perceptual information about our enviro 1 Consciousness Consciousness: The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means.… Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it. (Sutherland 1995, 95)
Exercise 1
Author(s):
local parish church
local parish churchyard
centre of your town or village
village green
local park or garden
school or college
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Bray, M. (1981) Bells of Memory: a history of the Loughborough Carillion, Loughborough, BRD Publishing.
Attree, H.R. (1809) Topography of Brighton: and, Picture of the Roads, from Thence to the Metropolis, Brighton and London.
Austen, J. (1967) Pride and Prejudice, in The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R.W. Chapman, vol.2, Oxford, Oxford University Press (this series first published 1923).
Batey, M. (1995) Regency Gardens, Princes Risborough, Shire Publ
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