War and Literature Research Papers (original) (raw)

Course Description: As many as 300,000 children and young people under the age of 18 are currently fighting in conflicts around the world. Hundreds of thousands more have been recruited into armed forces. Although most child soldiers are teenagers, some are as young as 7 years old. In 1996 the UN reported that " One of the most alarming trends in armed conflict is the participation of children as soldiers. " In this course, students will view films and read texts that describe the roles played by children in conflict, explain the realities and diversity of child soldiers' experiences, and influence people's awareness of and attitudes towards child soldiers. Students will research, analyze, and consider policies and practices involved in the recruitment, rescue, rehabilitation, and reintegration of child soldiers in various conflicts around the world.

The corpus of narratives produced in Germany since 1943 about the battle of Stalingrad appears as a multifaceted "grand narrative" in which historiographical and mythical morphology coexist. The Nazi myth of Stalingrad contributed to shaping the cultural memory of the event during the war, and historians lately integrated that myth into the historical discourse about the "overcoming of the past" (Vergangenheitsbewältigung). In the meantime, hundreds of veterans published their witness-accounts about the great battle, blending the two spheres of history and myth on the level of storytelling. While historiographical discourse aims to consolidate positive knowledge of the battle in terms of chronology, witness-narratives blur chronological storytelling with the mythical archetypes of conquest, defeat, fall, and resurrection. I will examine the morphological characteristics of the "grand narrative" of Stalingrad by combining the notion of "structure" (Koselleck) with that of the narrative archetype (Frye) and by integrating these tools with the theory of adaptive and evolutional narratives (Carrol; Scalise-Sugyjama) to claim that the "grand narrative" of Stalingrad can be read as the mythic-historical account of how the German community survived defeat and was reborn from its own ashes.

- by Gianluca Cinelli
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- European History, German Studies, Comparative Literature, Trauma Studies
- by Wojciech Drąg
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- Poetry, Literary Canon, War and Literature

The graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman is the story of the writer’s own parents who survived several Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. In the novel, Jews are depicted as mice and Germans as cats. Spiegelman’s father has trouble coming into terms with the war experience. He, as the son of two Holocaust survivors, also struggles to make sense of the brutal reality of the war and the concentration camps. The irrelevant digressions in the text is a significant indicator of the writer’s difficulty to come into terms with the horror of war while, paradoxically, these digressions assist him to articulate ideas and put his parents’ story into paper. Spiegelman employs the dialogue form to overcome this struggle and communicate about the brutal reality of the war and Auschwitz. Opposite to the typical narratives, the author then employs the comics form—replacing the human figures with the animal cats and mice masks—to speak of the unspeakable horrifying tale. Using this particular form of comics enables the writer to disrupt the linear time concept and, consequently, aids him to report his parents’ story.

- by Abdul Walid Azizi
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- Literature, Holocaust Studies, War and Literature, Comics and Graphic Novels

Nanpō Shishū is a collection of poetry written by Jinbō Kotarō (1905-1990) when he was serving as a member of the Propaganda Division during the Japanese military occupation of Singapore (Shonan) from 1942 to1945. The poems, which describe his feelings during his ten months of duty in Singapore were written in Japanese and self-published in 1944 after Kotarō’s return to Japan. In other words, the target readers of his poems were Japanese only. This study does not delve into the reasons for Jinbō’s involvement in the Asia-Pacific War, since he was known as a romantic poet, but to analyze the characteristic of his poems and how he describes the relationship between Japanese and the multiethnicity of Singaporean people at that time. This study employs a qualitative approach that prioritizes the literary materials, especially Jinbō’s poetry collection, Nanpō Shishū.

- by Antonius R. Pujo Purnomo
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- War and Literature
- by marco mondini
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- War Studies, Cultural History of War, First World War, War and Literature
- by Giulia A. Disanto
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- War and Literature, Leo Spitzer, War Corresondence

Visual and cultural analysis of Meiji shōnen kaiko 明治少年懐古 (Reminiscences of a Meiji youth, 1944), an illustrated book that nostalgically recalls Japan's late nineteenth and early twentieth century period of modernization. The book is in the Pulverer Collection of Japanese illustrated books of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC and is featured on The World of the Japanese Illustrated Book website. My commentary, along with a complete set of readable images of the book, may be found here: http://pulverer.si.edu/node/440/title/1.

- by Alicia Volk
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- Japanese Studies, Visual Studies, Prints, Print Culture

Both Ernest Hemingway and Giovanni Comisso were involved in the First World War, but while Comisso was a career officer who witnessed the rout of Caporetto and the ensuing chaotic retreat of the Regio Esercito, Hemingway reconstructed the events of October-November 1917 ex post facto, inasmuch as he only arrived in Italy in June 1918. However, a close comparative reading of Comisso's memoir Giorni di guerra and Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms proves that the American novelist had carefully researched his narrative, as many details are consistent with the Italian writer's first-hand report. Moreover, the comparative analysis highlights some only apparently marginal utterances of Hemingway's characters which should be interpreted as hidden prolepses, hinting at oncoming events (the looming Caporetto disaster and its consequences). Hence this comparative reading helps us to fathom how deep is the hidden part of the narrative iceberg in A Farewell to Arms, and bring to light new layers of meaning of this complex and sometimes beguiling narrative.

- by Umberto Rossi
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- Ernest Hemingway, War and Literature, First World War Literature, Giovanni Comisso

[Spanish language article]
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Esta es la primera publicación sobre ‘El Aliento y el Barro’ (‘The Spirit and the Clay’), by Shevawn Lynam, en Euskadi o en el estado. Da a conocer la novela como un documento único sobre la resistencia vasca contra el Franquismo en la clandestinidad, basado en hechos reales recogidos por la autora irlandesa. Nueve capítulos interconectados cuentan la historia de vascas y vascos de a pie, trabajando contra el régimen durante dieciseis años, desde la derrota del bando democrático en la guerra civil hasta la traición de la asamblea general de la ONU.
.........
This is the first publication about 'The Spirit and the Clay', by Shevawn Lynam, to appear in the Basque Country or Spain. It brings attention to the novel as a unique document about the Basque underground resistance against Francoism, based on real events gathered by the Irish author. Nine interconnected chapters tell the stories of ordinary Basque women and men, working against the regime for sixteen years, from the defeat of the pro-democracy side in the civil war to the treason of the UN General Assembly.
..................
“La Novela de la Corresponsal" /El Aliento y el Barro/ The Spirit and the Clay” [commissioned].
El Correo Culture Supplement. 20 October 2018, p. 8.

- by Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka
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- Irish Studies, English Literature, Women's Studies, Irish Literature
- by Carolina Sanchez-Palencia
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- Visual Studies, Sociology of the Body, War and Literature

World War I was an extremely destructive war that began in 1914 and lasted until 1918. Britain, which had a defensive agreement with Belgium, entered the war when Germany attacked Belgium. The war affected lives of many people, particularly soldiers, who suffered social trauma. Among them are some English poets who took part in battles which had impact on their literary expression. Nevertheless, there were several poets who glorified the war, but most of them never fought in the war. Rupert Brooke wrote a poem “Peace”, in which he describes the war as something that is sacred and that brings peace to the soldiers, while Wilfred Owen in his “Dulce et Decorum Est” writes about the horrors of war and its disastrous influence on the soldiers who experience it.

- by Andrea Golemac
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- Poetry, First World War, War and Literature

For many Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and interested war-journalists, Catch-22 is a salient touchstone that depicts contemporary military ineptitude and absurdity. But it is not just Heller's ridicule of the cultural or material aspects of soldiering that seem familiar. The novel offers a harrowing portrait of Yossarian’s apprehension that he is trapped within a literal war-machine--the B-25 bomber--that may very well kill him, a situation that echoes the experiences of contemporary soldiers wheeling down narrow lanes of fire, waiting for the blast from an improvised explosive. Heller's accurate portrayal of the psychology of fear that can accompany soldiering is coupled with a critique of a broader society that enables its most powerful members to play the victim.

- by John M Meyer and +1
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- Literature, World War II, War and Literature, Joseph Heller
- by micaela latini
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- German Studies, Comparative Literature, German Literature, War Studies

Since 2005, Iranian writer and veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, Ahmad Dehqan, has emerged as one of the most well-known writers of fiction based on that war. War fiction in Iran (as well as other forms of cultural production about the war) generally has adhered to the official narrative of 'Sacred Defense,' which the Islamic Republic has promoted. The state also has been, and continues to be, the chief supporter of cultural production dealing with the war, particularly through institutions such as the Howzeh-ye Honari (Islamic Arts Center). Ahmad Dehqan is one such writer who is affiliated with the state. His fiction, however, particularly his novel Safar beh garā-ye devist va haftād darajeh (Journey to Heading 270 Degrees) and short story collection, Man qātel-e pesar-tān hastam (I Killed Your Son), not only fail to adhere to the norms of Sacred Defense fiction, but in many ways, attempt to undermine it. By focusing on two of Dehqan's short stories from the collection I Killed Your Son, this article argues that his fiction mines the recent past to challenge the authority of the Sacred Defense narrative by rewriting aspects of stories that took place during the war. In doing so, he reasserts the unsettled nature of the war narrative today in Iranian society and the continued interest and importance of the war.

- by Amir Moosavi
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- Persian Literature, Iranian Studies, The Iran-Iraq War, War and Literature
- by Deirdre Barrett
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- Military History, Political Sociology, Social Movements, Psychology

The German invasion of the Netherlands on the 10th of May 1940 was not only a tragedy for the Dutch people; it was also a tragedy for Dutch literature. In a few weeks time, the intellectual leaders of an entire generation would disappear. In the chaos of the battle of Rotterdam, Doeke Zijlstra, editor in chief of the publishing house Nijgh & Van Ditmar, was killed by a stray bullet. Publisher Robert Leopold, who feared German revenge for his publication of Hermann Rauschning’s critical work Hitler Speaks, shot himself. The promising Jewish writer Jacob Hiegentlich took poison and died. The young poet Tom de Bruin was accidentally shot by a nervous Dutch sentry. Hendrik Marsman, the most celebrated Dutch poet of his time, was among the few who found a place on a ship that would bring him to England. Within sight of the coast, however, they were hit by a German torpedo and he drowned. By then, two of the most prominent essayists, Edgar Du Perron and Menno ter Braak, had already died; Du Perron collapsed with a heart attack during the bombardment of an airport near his home in Bergen and ter Braak committed suicide upon the news of the Dutch surrender to the Germans. None of them ever knew about the death of the others.
What might seem as the last chapter of a Greek tragedy was only the beginning. During the occupation, at least 700 men and women of the underground press would lose their lives. The punishment for participation in the clandestine press was equivalent to that for acts of sabotage. Propaganda had been an essential element in the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and, as such, a strict control over the press in the occupied Netherlands was considered of paramount importance. Literature was given a totally new purpose in the occupied Netherlands; it became propaganda in support of the Nazification of Dutch society and the tightening of links between the “Germanic” Dutch and their German “brothers.”
Hence, Dutch authors were suddenly confronted with a tough challenge. For decades, most of them had preferred the loftiness of the ivory tower over the squabbling of daily politics. In 1937, the celebrated novelist Simon Vestdijk still wrote: “The creative artist faces war like a toddler: utterly helpless.” Only a couple of years later, his publishing house was bombed and he himself was taken hostage. The same author, who didn’t want to have anything to do with war, had ended up in its clutches.
In fact, after the German invasion, participation in political debates was no longer an option. It had become a necessity. Even keeping quiet was now considered a political statement. In this context, a simple poem could have a huge impact.

- by Jeroen Dewulf
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- Jewish Studies, Propaganda, War Studies, Fascism
- by Mona Hoorvash
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- American Literature, Homer, The Novel, 1960s (U.S. history)

A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-option under the Islamic Republic tells the story of the lives and works of Iranian poets whose personal and literary career were shaped by the Iranian revolution in 1979. By drawing on similar examples, such as Soviet Russia, the book tries to tackle some key questions: how did these poets come to be known in the literary scene? What did they write about, and what were their ideas, styles, and literary techniques? And, last but not least, what kind of relationship have they established with the ruling power on the course of the past four decades? In a detailed study, Shams tackles the life and work of ten Iranian poets whose personal and literary lives transformed and were transformed by the 1979 Revolution and the rise of the Islamic Republic, shedding light on ways in which the current ruling state in Iran uses literature and particularly poetry as a tool for ideological dissemination.

- by Fatemeh Shams
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- World Literatures, Persian Literature, Iranian Studies, Literary Theory

The portrayal of Muslim women in the growing literature on the Iran-Iraq War (22 September 1980–20 August 1988), as an ideological reservoir, has been and still remains a highly debatable issue as well as a large academic gap. The experience of female captives or soldiers as marginal issue in gender-specific genre, namely war literature, has made female narratives a popular and controversial topic of discussion among literary scholars and critics. In a similar vein, the current study explores, for the first time, the most salient textual, pictorial and paratextual elements on a book cover of an Iranian bestseller, a memoir of a female prisoner of war in the Iran-Iraq Conflict, Ma`sumah Abad’s Man Zindah’am (2013; I’m Alive, forthcoming). Belonging to war literature and the post-revolutionary Iranian culture (after 1979), the book benefits from the attention of large, diverse audiences or readerships because of reinforcing and subverting discourses embedded in its text and paratext. Relying on the interconnection between ideology and sign, the current study utilizes Althusser’s concept of interpellation and Barthes’ semiotic model to examine the ideological, aesthetic, and commercial strategies operating in the paratextual elements on this book cover. The present research also offers some insight into the cover illustration of this national bestseller surrounding a feminine identity. It offers space to compare and contrast this image of femininity with a female image on the book cover of another bestseller in Iran, interestingly again a memoir of war detailing Sayyidah Zahra Husseini’s experiences during the Iran–Iraq War, entitled as Da [2008; One Woman’s War: Da (Mother), 2014]. The paper concludes that not only ideology, but also women’s new voice in war literature have constituted a step forward in the Muslim heroine’s evolution toward autonomy. This autonomy is portrayed inside and on the two national bestsellers that still continue to sell thousands of copies each year.

- by Azra Ghandeharion
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- Semiotics, Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, Middle East Studies

War has become a fixture of American culture. It has been a constant background fact of U.S. geopolitics, it forms the theme of countless books, films and games, and despite many deaths and mostly failed military campaigns, it seems to exert an enduring fascination on politicians and citizens alike. This book explores how war has been portrayed in the United States since the Second World War, with a particular focus on an emotionally charged but rarely scrutinized topic: combat death. The author argues that most stories about war use three main building blocks: melodrama, adventure, and horror. Melodrama and adventure have helped make war seem acceptable to the American public by portraying combat death as a meaningful sacrifice, and by making military killing look necessary and often even pleasurable. Horror no longer serves its traditional purpose of making the bloody realities of war injury and death repulsive, and has been repurposed in recent years to intensify the positivity of melodrama and adventure. What emerges from this book is an in-depth attempt to understand how war stories perform ideological and emotional work, and how they manage to have such a powerful grip on the American imagination.

- by Agnieszka Soltysik
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- Genre studies, Cold War and Culture, Melodrama, War Films

International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Volume 48, Issue 3, January 2017.

- by Ikram Masmoudi and +1
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- Arabic Literature, Middle Eastern Studies, War and Literature, Iraq War
- by Jan Mieszkowski
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- American Literature, British Literature, Cultural Studies, American Studies

John Steinbeck was prolific during the Depression and War years: 1930-1945. Not only did he write twenty-seven books, but he put his journalist training into action. As an embedded reporter he performed primary research for his novels, “on the front lines, observing and reporting on the major events of his century: the Depression, World War II, the Cold War, Vietnam” (Parini 2004). In this essay, I claim Steinbeck more profoundly reflected and affected American politics than any other author from 1930 to 1945. As evidence, I provide succinct precis of Steinbeck’s three Depression and three World War II novels.

- by Evan L . Johnson
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- Steinbeck Studies, War and Literature, War Literature, John Steinbeck

Narratives of War considers the way war and battle are remembered and narrated across space and time in Europe in the twentieth century. eds. Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel, Michael Wintle The book reflects on how narratives are generated and... more

- by Remco Ensel
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- Narrative, War Studies, Oral history, Memory Studies
- by Gavin Murphy
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- Military History, War Studies, Women, Feminism

This article contends that Wordsworth’s treatment of the Discharged Soldier is influenced by a scandal that followed the publication of William Cobbett’s pamphlet The Soldier’s Friend (1792). Cobbett publicized the mistreatment of soldiers in the secretive British army, calling particular attention to the embezzlement of troops’ salaries by senior officers. The Soldier’s Friend influenced both texts and protests that addressed military conditions in the 1790s. Wordsworth read contemporary pamphlets and knew the circle of Cobbett’s publisher, Ridgway. The behavior of Wordsworth’s Discharged Soldier evokes the demoralized soldiery Cobbett depicts: malnourished, poorly clothed, but unwilling to reveal details of his hardship for fear of recrimination under the Mutiny Act. Wordsworth explores these ideas further in The Borderers, in which Rivers has been corrupted by mistreatment in service and poses a threat to society on his return home, where he replicates the abuse he endured.

- by Chris Murray
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- Romanticism, William Wordsworth, English Romanticism, War and Literature
- by Francis Lough
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- War and Literature, Literature of the Spanish Civil War
- by Chris Vanderwees
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- American Literature, Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Feminist Theory

Chapter Four shifts to adventure and the aesthetic pleasures of killing for one’s country. The cultural text at the heart of the chapter is Robin Moore’s book, The Green Berets (1965), and the song, film, and subgenre of paramilitary pulp fiction that it inspired. Like melodrama, adventure is a major cultural mode, larger than the term “genre” accurately describes, and encompasses a wide variety of fictional and non-fictional writing. The basic plot of the adventure mode is the journey of a man to a frontier where he encounters death and, more to the point, learns how to kill. Adventure, which often overlaps with coming-of-age narratives, is nearly always focused on male protagonists and is interwoven with racialist and colonial tropes, situations, and assumptions. Like melodrama, adventure is inherently an enchanting mode. If the former enchants by rendering death sacred and meaningful, the latter enchants by linking killing to pleasure and masculinity.

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police covers a broad spectrum from totalitarian regime, cultural and individual memories, notion of cognition to the themes such as familial loss, identity and power shifts. Originally published in Japanese in 1994 and translated into English in the year 2019 the book was named a finalist for the 2020 International Booker Prize. The book narrates the dystopian fable of an unnamed island where objects and its memory thereof disappear.

- by Chandralekha Panda
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- Cultural Studies, Cognitive Psychology, Postmodernism, Memory Studies

The destructive power and terrifying devastation wrought on civilian populations by the advent of aerial bombing during the Second World War transformed the postwar urban landscape in the 20th Century. In particular, the fallen cities of Dresden and Hiroshima to firebombing and the first atomic bomb, respectively, testified to this nightmarish new experiment in war. The unearthly remains of both space and lives left survivors grasping for a language to make sense of their experiences and, more challengingly, cope with the resulting trauma. However, with clichéd commonplace language doing little except as, in W.G. Sebald’s words, “a gesture to banish memory” and left with, as Kurt Vonnegut’s articulates, “nothing intelligent to say about a massacre,” writers had to find another mode to endow meaning to the events, so they turned to time. In this paper, I argue that the disrupted time scheme in Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House Five and the rippling temporal emanations in John Hersey’s Hiroshima encompass the exploded aftermath of aerial bombing.

- by Annie Yi
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- Second World War, Kurt Vonnegut, War and Literature, War Trauma and Literature
- by Alexie Tcheuyap
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- War Studies, African Literature, War and Literature
- by Hansel Raphael
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- Literature, Heroism, Aeneid, Ernest Hemingway

Râsul supersonic al lui Thomas Pynchon. Sesizăm că s-au produs adevărate mutaţii ale ontologicului, incomodându-ne gândirea, mutaţii care au trecut şi în ficţiunea celor mai curajoşi scriitori. Marea Carte care e lumea (romanului apocaliptic) foloseşte alte semne, o altă scriere, alte experimente, iar partea indestructibilă a omului, aşa cum se relevă ea din aceste ciocniri cu alte medii, îi dă scrisului lui Pynchon acea febrilitate de absorbţie a abisului, inconfundabilă la cei mai mari scriitori ai secolului al XX-lea.

- by Maria Laakso
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- Dystopian Literature, Dystopian Fiction, War and Literature, Finnish Literature

This contribution focuses on Curzio Malaparte and his works Kaputt and La pelle during Italy's transition from Fascism to democracy. I argue that in his books he rejected the narratives of collective sacrifice and national redemption that were dominant after the end of WWII, from the Resistance myth of "Nuovo Risorgimento" to historicist readings of Fascism as a malady in an otherwise healthy national body. On the score of biopolitical theory, the article concentrates on Malaparte's critical appraisal of the tragic contrast between modern technology and the fragility of creaturely life. Malaparte depicts an irredeemable conflict through Christological allegories of scapegoating deployed from a radically secular perspective, resisting any historical progress or any dialectical superior solution.

- by Franco Baldasso
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- Italian Studies, Fascism, Totalitarianism, Modernism

Miriam Katin’s two graphic memoirs We Are on Our Own [(2006).
Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly] and Letting It Go [(2013). Montreal:
Drawn & Quarterly] both reflect on how the trauma of the
Holocaust can be transformed through and in art. In the former
Katin details how she and her mother narrowly escape the Nazi
occupation of Hungary by fleeing to the countryside when she
was a toddler, while the latter shows how Katin, who has since
emigrated to the United States, is still struggling with anxieties
decades after, which are the result of the Holocaust. Using
insights from both memory studies and Bessel Van Der Kolk’s
experimental psychological theories that trauma is an embodied
experience and that it can be partly released through physical and
creative practices, this essay argues that Katin finds solace
through the multimodal activity of drawing and writing herself
out of the negative aftereffects that the Holocaust have on her.

- by Diederik Oostdijk
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- Trauma Studies, Graphic Novels, World War II, War and Literature

In November 2018, the centenary of the end of "the war to end all wars" was commemorated all around the world. World War I affected millions of people and had a profound impact on literature and culture. The paper discusses Dalton Trumbo's 1939 pacifist novel Johnny Got His Gun and its late 20 th century legacy. Although the novel was published long after the war's end, it remains one of the most powerful anti-war statements. Contrary to more famous World War I novels it does not deal with the disillusionment of the postwar generation. The story of a quadruple amputee which takes place entirely in the main protagonist's head is a claustrophobic and nightmarish journey into the mind of a young boy trapped in himself, imprisoned in darkness. The novel frequently fell out of favor during the 20 th century but it enjoyed its share of popularity in Czechoslovakia, thanks to Trumbo's communist sympathies.

- by Jozef Pecina
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- American Literature, American Studies, War and Literature, Dalton Trumbo