Description
Book SynopsisCombat Death in Contemporary American Culture: Popular Cultural Conceptions of War since World War II explores how war has been portrayed in the United States since World War II, with a particular focus on an emotionally charged but rarely scrutinized topic: combat death. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet argues that most stories about war use three main building blocks: melodrama, adventure, and horror. Monnet examines how 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 repulsive, but has instead been repurposed in recent years to intensify the positivity of melodrama and adventure. Thus this book offers a fascinating diagnosis of how war stories perform ideological and emotional work and why they have such a powerful grip on the American imagination.
Trade ReviewA remarkable achievement. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet offers readers a profound, eloquent, and haunting reflection on the relationship between war and American culture.
-- Andrew Bacevich, author of America's War for the Greater Middle East
For all of us drugged by American war culture, this book comes as a Prince Charming to awaken us from our treacherous fantasies. Dr. Monnet’s dissection of the genre conventions that control our emotional responses to war stories is stunningly brilliant. Her exploration of how the conventions of melodrama and horror fiction now tend to undermine the intentions of many would-be antiwar works is truly eye-opening. The book has made me rethink many works I thought I understood well, and it would be a treasure chest for a variety of courses. Anyone seeking to free us from our culture of war must read the invaluable volume.
-- H. Bruce Franklin, professor emeritus, Rutgers University; author of Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War
It was said that the Civil War photographer Mathew Brady changed America forever by laying the battlefield dead at the people’s doorsteps. In her unflinching study, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet shows how the battlefield victims of America’s “war culture” have increasingly dominated the imagery of literature and film since the end of the Second World War—to a degree that Brady’s contemporaries could scarcely have imagined. Theoretically informed, richly illustrated, and driven as much by a hatred of war as by the awareness of its perverse seduction, this book magisterially builds upon the insights of Richard Slotkin’s classic Regeneration through Violence.
-- Will Kaufman, author of The Civil War in American Culture and American Culture in the 1970s
Table of ContentsChapter One: Melodrama, Dying and the Sacred: The Cult of Iwo Jima
Chapter Two: Melodrama Queered: The Outsider (1961) and The Portable War Memorial (1968)
Chapter Three: Melodramatizing Iwo Jima in the 21st Century: James Bradley’s and Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers
Chapter Four: Adventure, Killing and the Pleasures of War: Robin Moore’s The Green Berets (1965)
Chapter Five: Adventure Revisited: Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977) and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014)
Chapter Six: Horror, Irony and the Anti-war Novel: Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers
Chapter Seven: The Hero’s Journey to Film and Back: Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and Hasford’s Counter-attack
Coda: The Future of War Culture, the Cultural War for the Future
