Warriors Path: War, Moral Injury and Reclaiming the Soul, Discussion Series 2 on the Military Graphic Novel, The White Donkey (original) (raw)
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Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literatures, 2022
Kevin Powers is a war veteran, who employs his experience as a war veteran in the American army in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 to narrate his debut novel, The Yellow Birds (2013). This study investigates Powers' portrayal of post-heroism in the context of the Second Gulf War. This novel illustrates the deformed face of war within an emerging post-heroic atmosphere. Post-heroism, instead of bravery and chivalry, signals the decline of heroic ethos in the context of war, in which soldiers are left to question the true value of sacrifice in the battlefield. The narrative's battlefield imagery, emotive repercussions of those involved and motives of war are examined by referring to the soldiers' post-heroism. Albeit war is personified as a looming figure at the onset of the narrative, Powers' post-heroic narrative leaves little doubt of the futility of engaging with war.
The SAGE Encyclopedia of War: Social Science Perspectives, 2017
Across the globe throughout history, war has had an inhuman effect on the human condition, and the insensate destruction has apparently brought a hideous pattern of terror over time. Technological advancements, particularly in military technology, have developed more powerful ways to massacre millions of people and horrify a state or country. Throughout history, many writers have written on war without having a direct experience of it; however, world literatures have been filled with firsthand knowledge of war provided by “soldier-poets,” reflecting what war can do to the psyche and body.
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.
Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War and Literature by Joshua Pederson (A Book Review)
Review of International American Studies
Joshua Pederson’s Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War and Literature proposes the use of moral injury – a psychological concept describing the affliction of those who break their moral code when committing despicable acts – as a framework through which war narratives of the American War on Terror can be productively read without resorting to the controversial idea of perpetrator trauma, which seems to excuse veterans as victims of the war. Pederson provides the reader with a clinical overview of the condition as well as a first literary theory of moral injury as a manifestation of various forms of excess through a genealogical reading that includes analyses of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Camus’ The Fall. Sin Sick appears as a step in the right direction as it addresses in a timely manner a blind spot in trauma theory using a concept that more accurately describes a specific type of suffering. In the author’s mind the very term “moral injury” entails an acknowledgement of the sol...
Christian Scholar's Review , 2016
A Review Essay of Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini, Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2013); Robert Emmet Meagher, Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014); Nancy Sherman, Afterwar: Healing the Wounds of Our Soldiers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Bill Russell Edmonds, God Is Not Here: A Soldier's Struggle with Torture, Trauma, and the Moral Injuries of War (New York: Pegasus Books, 2015).