Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

Combat Death in Contemporary American Culture (eBook, ePUB)

Popular Cultural Conceptions of War since World War II

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Combat 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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury eBooks US
• Seitenzahl: 306
• Erscheinungstermin: 16. Dezember 2020
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781793634962
• Artikelnr.: 60591726

Autorenporträt

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet is professor of American literature and culture at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Inhaltsangabe

Chapter 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