Book Review Bringing War to Book (original) (raw)

On Military Memoirs. Soldier-authors, publishers, plots and motives.

Although there are quite a few soldiers who write autobiographies about their deployment experiences, a comprehensive profile does not exist that provides reliable, quantifiable insight into 21st century soldier-authors that exceeds the Anglo-American view, especially when it comes to (self-published) books. This study makes up for these deficiencies by studying all non-fiction, autobiographical books, first published between 2001 and 2010 in Dutch, English or German in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands that (mainly) deal with the deployment experiences of military personnel in Afghanistan and are intended for the public at large. It provides answers to four questions: 1. Who are the soldiers who write autobiographical books about their deployment in Afghanistan? 2. Who are their publishers? 3. What do they write about? 4. Why do they say they write? To answer these questions, this study uses statistical analysis in combination with qualitative descriptive coding techniques to provide a cross-cultural analysis of five different Western countries. It is an interdisciplinary study, using and combining theories and methods from five different fields: sociology, history, literature, psychology and anthropology. One of the conclusions from this research is that in the countries studied there is a very strong relationship between the number of soldiers that have been deployed to Afghanistan and the number of books produced. For every 6,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, one extra mission-related autobiographical book is published. Another main conclusion is that the soldier-authors of these books are only partly (when it comes to branch of service and gender) representative of the average soldier. Particularly noticeable is that where the average soldier is deployed with his own unit, the average soldier-author is often (50%) individually deployed. This result was predicted by what is called in this study the ‘fringe writer hypothesis’. In some countries, the majority (Germany) or even all military autobiographies (the UK, Canada) are published by publishers that invest at their own cost and risk in these books (‘traditional publishers’), in other countries (the US, the Netherlands) there is also a large self-publishing market for military books. Most military autobiographies are still published with traditional publishers, which are hardly ever specialized military publishers, but normally general publishers. These traditional publishers are looking for the traditional soldier: a soldiers who has been deployed more than once, preferable with his or her own unit, is a professional, not a reservist, with a junior rank and a kinetic background. This ideal commercial writer, however, neither exactly resembles the average soldier, nor the average soldier-author. Whether a soldier-author’s book will have a positive or a negative plot can be reasonably predicted by looking at two author characteristics. Authors who still work for the Ministry of Defence when their book is first published generally write positive plots, and kinetic soldiers predominantly write negative plots. The research into plots confirmed Harari’s revelatory plot thesis, which predicts that the majority of contemporary military autobiographies either has a disenchantment plot or a growth plot. At the same time it showed that Fussell’s disillusionment thesis (that military autobiographies have predominantly disenchantment plots) is no longer valid in the 21st century Afghanistan autobiographies that are written by professional soldiers, instead of conscripts. The specific choice of plot is country-dependent and related to that country’s strategic narrative on war in general, and on the mission in Afghanistan in particular. In a nowadays pacifist country like Germany, the disenchantment plots prevail, for example, whereas in a militarily ambitious country such as the UK growth and action plots dominate. Almost all soldier-authors researched offer some kind of motivation why they write. Four main reasons can be distinguished: getting recognition, enabling change, helping others or helping themselves. What is striking is that intrapersonal reasons (such as helping others or enabling change) are far more common than personal reasons such as helping yourself. Self-help motives in general are mostly given by individually deployed soldiers. The study ends with some recommendations for further research, that include validating the results found in this study by looking at other countries, non-military autobiographies books and by researching the illustrations found in these books.

The War Books Controversy Revisited: First World War Novels and Veteran Memory

Narratives of War Remembering and Chronicling Battle in Twentieth-Century Europe, 2019

The proliferation of war novels in the late 1920s and early 1930s divided readership and caused significant controversy. Motivated by the desire to determine the ‘proper’ way of writing the First World War, the many debates on war novels revealed the existence of a deeper crisis of memory which culminated around the first ten-year anniversary of the Armistice. The debates surrounding Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Jean Norton Cru’s study Witnesses (Témoins, 1929) have already received considerable critical attention, but the War Books Controversy was, in many respects, a pan-European phenomenon. A comparative outline is given of the arguments used in the debates that followed the publication of All Quiet on the Western Front in Germany and Witnesses in France. Other illustrations are the controversy in Britain at the beginning of the 1930s, and a later debate, stirred by veterans’ testimonies on the subject of a Serbian war novel of the 1930s, Stevan Jakovljević’s Serbian Trilogy (Srpska trilogija). The War Books Controversy can be seen as the first evidence of a major reconfiguration of the boundaries between fictional and factual narration, whose consequences are keenly felt today in a literary market progressively dominated by ‘faction’.

Writing War, Wronging the Person: Representation of Human Insecurity in War Literature

Journal of English Language and Literature

This paper presents a survey of literature written in response to wars throughout the world. The paper argues that plays, poems, memoirs and novels have been written to celebrate combatants as heroes; war literature has also been written to overcome the trauma of war while other literature has been written to underscore the effects of war and to speak out against wars. The paper also discusses the rationale for studying war literature and argues that as creative expression, literature allows us, through the imagined world of the author, to identify social trends and structures that shape the world, in particular, the factors that lead to and sustain conflict, as well as experiences of war and its long term individual and general effects. Also, literature's aesthetic quality and its capacity to engage its audience makes it easier to transmit war time experience, and hopefully the wisdom gained from that experience, from one generation to another.

Truth and (self) censorship in military memoirs

It can be difficult for researchers from outside the military to gain access to the field. However, there is a rich source on the military that is readily available for every researcher: military memoirs. This source does provide some methodological challenges with regard to truth and (self) censorship, nevertheless. This study questions how truth and (self) censorship issues influence the content of military memoirs. It shows that these issues are not only a concern for researchers, but also for military writers themselves. The study provides concrete quantitative data based on military Afghanistan memoirs published between 2001-2010 from five different countries (the UK, the US, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands). The majority of soldier-authors make some kind of truth claim in their books that they also substantiate. Books published by traditional publishers do so significantly more often than self-published books. In books published in Anglo-Saxon countries soldier-authors make five times more often truth claims than military authors from the Netherlands and Germany do. At the same time, military authors also frequently admit to some form of self-censuring, so truth claims and self-censorship go hand in hand. From each of the countries studied, at least one author mentions being actively censored by the military, but most don’t even mention it, making censorship a common, almost normal military feature. Making truth claims, mentioning being censored, or self-censoring do not influence the kind of plots these authors write either in a negative, or positive way.

Authoring the self: Media, voice and testimony in soldiers’ memoirs

Media, War & Conflict, 2016

In this article, the author focuses on the struggles over self-representation that soldiers have engaged in at two key historical moments of modern Western warfare: the First World War, the first major industrialised conflict of the 20th century (1914–1918); and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the so-called ‘War on Terror’, which marked the emergence of information warfare in the 21st century (2001–2014). The Western soldier’s self-representation, the author concludes, has shifted from a practice of observing the battlefield as a strange place and himself as an ‘other’ within it, to a practice of considering the ‘other’, here the Iraqi or Afghani local, as the self, someone who shares a Western sense of humanity. These antithetical self-representations, the author argues, point in turn to complex transformations in the technologies, moralities and cultures of warfare, throwing into relief uneasy tensions in the West’s 21st-century interventionist conflicts. In their attempt to move a...