War Writings Research Articles

Belligerent muse: five northern writers and how they shaped our understanding of the Civil War

War destroys, but it also inspires, stimulates, and creates. It is, in this way, a muse, and a powerful one at that. The American Civil War was a particularly prolific muse--unleashing with its violent realities a torrent of language, from soldiers' intimate letters and diaries to everyday newspaper accounts, great speeches, and enduring literary works. In Belligerent Muse, Stephen Cushman considers the Civil War writings of five of the most significant and best known narrators of the conflict: Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ambrose Bierce, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Considering their writings both as literary expressions and as efforts to record the rigors of the war, Cushman analyzes their narratives and the aesthetics underlying them to offer a richer understanding of how Civil War writing chronicled the events of the conflict as they unfolded and then served to frame the memory of the war afterward.Elegantly interweaving military and literary history, Cushman uses some of the war's most famous writers and their works to explore the profound ways in which our nation's great conflict not only changed the lives of its combatants and chroniclers but also fundamentally transformed American letters.

On War Writing: A Roundtable Discussion

On War Writing: A Roundtable Discussion

Vietnam and Beyond: Tim O’Brien and the Power of Storytelling by Stefania Ciocia (review)

Reviewed by: Vietnam and Beyond: Tim O’Brien and the Power of Storytelling by Stefania Ciocia Ty Hawkins Ciocia, Stefania. Vietnam and Beyond: Tim O’Brien and the Power of Storytelling. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012. 256pp. $99.95. With Vietnam and Beyond: Tim O’Brien and the Power of Storytelling, Stefania Ciocia has published the first scholarly monograph devoted solely to Tim O’Brien to appear in more than a decade. Ciocia attempts to elevate O’Brien to the status of a “world author,” which positions her to argue for the universality of major O’Brien themes. Of particular importance to her effort is his concept of “story-truth,” which she examines from myriad angles in a text that eschews a chronological treatment of O’Brien, favoring a thematic approach instead. Ciocia claims a desire to correct a certain “pigeon-holing” of O’Brien as solely a war author so that his work might be “judged against the parameters of great literature tout court” (2). However, her study falls short of that goal, largely because she fails to engage O’Brien with sufficient rigor. This lack of rigor results in a book whose synthetic capacity outweighs its generative potential. For Ciocia, there exists an odd contradiction at the heart of O’Brien’s reception. On the one hand, she writes, we engage O’Brien as an author whose concerns have global relevance. On the other hand, we confine O’Brien to the realm of US Vietnam War fiction. She wants us to understand that “Vietnam is for O’Brien a productive starting point for the treatment of wider themes with a deep, universal resonance... and for the development of thought-provoking formal experiments underpinned by a strong sense of one’s moral accountability” (2). Much of Ciocia’s study devotes itself to uncovering O’Brien’s skill in both of these areas; she is particularly interested in O’Brien’s contribution to postmodern literary aesthetics and O’Brien’s competence as a cultural critic. She sees these two aspects of O’Brien’s work as interdependent and reconciled through O’Brien’s devotion to “story-truth.” As those familiar with his canon will recall, O’Brien opposes “story-truth” to “happening-truth,” and privileges the former over the latter in a dichotomy perhaps guilty of laying the groundwork for a paralytic relativism. However, Ciocia does not challenge O’Brien on this issue, writing, [End Page 705] O’Brien firmly rejects the moral authority typically associated with experience, in favour of a fragile, and always provisional, personal connection with the Other, to be sought after in the endless refashioning of stories and in the imaginative identification with the plight of fellow human beings—an imperfect foundation for our ethical commitments, and yet the only foundation available to us at all. (12) Ciocia does offer intriguing ideas relevant to O’Brien’s place in literary history. She proves especially interesting when discussing O’Brien’s relationship to Joseph Conrad, whose novella, Heart of Darkness, has served as a major influence for a number of US Vietnam War writers and filmmakers. Ciocia distinguishes between Conrad’s modernism and O’Brien’s postmodernism by foregrounding the concept of performance, writing that O’Brien’s fiction “enacts the belief that truth can be painstakingly summoned and momentarily glimpsed through the performativity of the narrative act” (35). She offers an extensive close-reading of O’Brien’s story, “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” uncovering an intertextual dialogue of sorts between Conrad and O’Brien. Unfortunately, Ciocia pushes this too far. Her argument that protagonist Mary Anne Bell’s fate—Mary Anne’s performance, as it were—represents a kind of gender-bending transcendence is unearned. Rather, a better reading of the end of “Sweetheart” would uncover how the war subsumes Mary Anne, which in turn points to how The Things They Carried shows us the power of war to reinforce traditional gender norms. This is a crucial lesson in a war-themed text that otherwise proves unconventionally inviting to women readers, as Ciocia herself clarifies. Besides Conrad, Ciocia also traces O’Brien’s literary heritage to Hawthorne, Melville, and Hemingway, among other figures...

Gender and the Subject of (Anti)Nuclear Politics: Revisiting Women’s Campaigning against the Bomb1

This article aims to rehabilitate women campaigners against nuclear weapons as a focus of study and interlocutor for feminist International Relations scholars. Highlighting the recent tendency in gender and security studies to ignore or stereotype these campaigners, I first show how their critical re-investigation has been facilitated by recent systematizations of poststructuralist-influenced feminist methodology. In this light, I then revisit the discourses circulating in women’s antinuclear activism in the 1980s before deconstructing in more detail the post-Cold War writings of Helen Caldicott and Angie Zelter. I argue that multiple, differently gendered constructions of the antinuclear campaigner were in play during the Cold War and have since been reconfigured in ways that reflect and reproduce the shift to a post-Cold War context and differences between the United States and UK. In such ways, then, women antinuclear campaigners continue to develop diverse oppositional subject positions in their efforts to challenge nuclear hegemony, in a discursive struggle worthy of attention from gender and security scholars as part of a broader, critical re-engagement with the gendered dimensions of nuclear politics.

Race, Empire and First World War Writing, ed. Santanu DasCulture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature, by Patrick Deer

Race, Empire and First World War Writing, ed. Santanu DasCulture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature, by Patrick Deer

Whitman's Children

Looking at Walt Whitman's Civil War writings—especially his memoirMemoranda during the Warand his letters of consolation—this essay argues that Whitman discovered in the war a way to enlarge the vision of sex and sexual possibility he had initiated in the “Calamus” poems of 1860. Taking as a point of departure the babies named Walt that were born after the war to soldiers for whom Whitman had cared, the essay describes the multiplicity of roles the poet inhabits in the war writing (mother, father, nurse, lover, confidant, scribe) and reads his acts of surrogacy as efforts to restore carnality, in its world-making force, to family and, in particular, to parenthood. Whitman's project of queer generation, the essay argues, usefully complicates recent scholarship on sex, time, and futurity.

Scarred souls, weary warriors, and military intervention: the emergence of the subject in the just war writings of Jean Bethke Elshtain

AbstractOver the past three decades Jean Bethke Elshtain has used her critique and application of just war as a means of engaging with multiple overlapping aspects of identity. Though Elshtain ostensibly writes about war and the justice, or lack of justice, therein, she also uses just war a site of analysis within which different strands of subjectivity are investigated and articulated as part of her broader political theory. This article explores the proposition that Elshtain's most important contribution to the just war tradition is not be found in her provision of codes or her analysis of ad bellum or in bello criteria, conformity to which adjudges war or military intervention to be just or otherwise. Rather, that she enriches just war debate because of the unique and sometimes provocative perspective she brings as political theorist and International Relations scholar who adopts, adapts, and deploys familiar but, for some, uncomfortable discursive artefacts from the history of the Christian West: suffused with her own Christian faith and theology. In so doing she continually reminds us that human lives, with all their attendant political, social, and religious complexities, should be the focus when military force is used, or even proposed, for political ends.

Writing, Remembering and Embodiment: Australian Literary Responses to the First World War

This paper is part of a larger project exploring Australian literary responses to the Great War of 1914-1918. It draws on theories of embodiment, mourning, ritual and the recuperative potential of writing, together with a brief discussion of selected exemplars, to suggest that literary works of the period contain and lay bare a suite of creative, corporeal and social impulses, including resurrection, placation or stilling of ghosts, and formation of an empathic and duty-bound community.

Book Review: Watergate’s Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse by Jon Marshall and Beyond the Killing Fields: War Writings by Sydney Schanberg

Synthesis Essay: Journalism's Crusading 1970sWatergate's Legacy and Press: The Investigative Impulse. Jon Marshall. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011. 336 pp. $24.95 pbk.Beyond Killing Fields: War Writings. Sydney Schanberg. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2010. 242 pp. $27.50 hbk.In gripping final scene of All President's Men, Hollywood version of Watergate, two young reporters who broke story are told that nothing is riding on their investigation except for the First Amendment to Constitution, freedom of press and maybe future of country. Journalism in 1970s remains a perfect teaching moment for brave, dogged reporting that helped shape America's direction.Both of these books forcefully document its history-one by surveying origins and possible future of kind of investigative journalism of which Washington Post's Watergate stories were a paragon and other by putting together a compilation of writings from one of hardest-hitting war correspondents of era.Jon Marshall's history of investigative journalism is another gem in growing Visions of American Press series by Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, and it is an eminently readable option for a textbook in undergraduate or graduate classes about history of American journalism. Famed Vietnam correspondent Sydney Schanberg's collection, centered on his 1970s articles from South Asia, makes for a page-turning read that anyone interested in war and media would find hard to put down. Read together today, when media landscape seems dominated by all non-public-affairs news that's fit to post, these two volumes offer a powerful snapshot of what journalism in public interest can accomplish.One of main strengths of Marshall's book is that it traces history of the investigative impulse from colonial news sheets to ProPublica, weaving in relevant aspects of changing journalism practices, structures, and sociopolitical pressures across more than three centuries. Marshall's central argument is a sad paradox- Watergate might have been both apex and undoing of kind of reporting that hinges on shining a spotlight on disturbing information that someone has tried very hard to keep hidden. And it is precisely that kind of reporting that has buttressed role of a free press in a democracy.Marshall, a former reporter and columnist who now teaches news writing at Northwestern University, starts his chronological narrative in 1600s, when American protojournalists were busy ferreting out information that colonial administrators wanted public to ignore. As concept of original reporting and interview developed in first half of nineteenth century, penny press journalists pursued cover-ups in everything from milk industry to brothels.Pulling together threads from a rich literature in investigative journalism, Marshall shows how, at turn of twentieth century, national magazines took up investigating with a vengeance, earning nickname of muckrakers while spurring government reforms of corporate giants such as those in oil and meatpacking industries. The world wars ushered in major press restrictions and increasingly sophisticated public relations operations, and journalism establishment put controversial digging on hold under veneer of expert objectivity.Outside mainstream, however, tradition continued. The Investigative Impulse helpfully reminds readers that advances in journalism history were not carried only by heavyweights like Washington Post but also by small underground publications, ethnic presses like African American newspapers, and countercultural outlets that never benefited from large budgets or institutional prestige.While book focuses on print, Marshall does not neglect other media, such as television in 1950s, where Edward R. …

“These frightful sights would work havoc with one’s brain”: Subjective Experience, Trauma, and Resilience in First World War Writings by Medical Personnel

“These frightful sights would work havoc with one’s brain”: Subjective Experience, Trauma, and Resilience in First World War Writings by Medical Personnel

Modernism, Truth, and the Canon of First World War Literature

The First World War is a prominent point of convergence for modernist studies and early twentieth-century cultural studies. Both disciplines have scrutinised the impact of the First World War on literary and cultural production, with an increasing willingness to extend their scope to hitherto neglected sources. The academic canon was subject to an ongoing process of revision begun by feminist, queer and Marxist critics in the 1980s. In the wake of a rise in social and cultural historiography, historical inquiry into the war has moreover shifted from mere ‘factual’ evidence to the extensive consideration of literary sources. However, the questions put to these sources and their evaluation as material for academic study often differ widely between the two fields. This article interrogates literary and historical practices regarding ‘modernist’ writing on the First World War, and illustrates the at times considerable tensions between the two approaches by a new critical reading of Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929).1 Borden’s work is representative of both contemporary and retrospective expectations connected with literary testimonies of the First World War, and the second half of this article argues that current readings of her work are affected by conflicting demands on war writing. The fact that Borden is not only a war writer but also a woman who served near the frontline as a nurse, opens up another layer of complication in her writing and its critical reception, which will be considered below. By dint of her experiences as a volunteer nurse on the one hand and the experimental nature of

Theorising a Quaker View of the Atonement

Gustaf Aulén described a classical view of the atonement, in which God through Christ triumphs over the forces of evil: ‘Christus victor’. Denny Weaver’s narrative Christus victor developed this view into a fully developed theory, spelled out as biblical narrative. A biblical theology framework provides a context for integrating this theory with Larry Shelton’s theory that God in the atonement establishes and maintains a new covenant community with humanity. Christus victor/covenant atonement incorporates biblical values of nonviolence and restorative justice; satisfaction and substitutionary theories are rooted in retributive justice and violence. George Fox was committed to a Christus victor view of Christ’s atonement. Lamb’s war writings of Fox, Burrough, and Nayler gave a powerful and original extension of that view. These Friends foreshadowed the combination of narrative Christus victor theory with covenant theory of the atonement.

Late Cuts: C.L.R. James, Cricket and Postcolonial England

This article centres upon C.L.R. James's last cricket writings which were published in the Brixton-based periodical Race Today between 1983 and 1986. The ‘Cricket Notes’ have received little critical attention but in their surprising focus upon English cricket and their scepticism about the dominant West Indies Test team of the time they provide evidence both of James's intellectual method and his particular use of cricket in exploring the postcolonial Caribbean and England in the mid-1980s. Relating the ‘Cricket Notes’ to his post-Second World War writings on anti-colonial struggles in West Africa and the Caribbean, the essay explores James's development of an idiosyncratic Marxist cultural politics in which sport was a central mode of performing and instigating revolutionary change. James's late preoccupation with English cricket, and particularly a tradition of stylish batsmen that he traces back to the innovative practices of W.G. Grace and C.B. Fry, is seen as an application of his political method to an English context. In discussing the cultural meanings of David Gower and his team in the most radical black journal of the time, James addressed the question of the means by which a radical postcolonial Englishness might be made and expressed through sport.

“The Sun of World Poetry”: Pushkin as a Cold War Writer

“The Sun of World Poetry”: Pushkin as a Cold War Writer Olga Voronina The Spell of the Spectacle: The Pushkin Celebrations of 1949 The festivities dedicated to the 150th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth, lasting from mid-April through early July 1949, were the second-greatest mass spectacle of the early Cold War after the Victory Parade. Echoing the sumptuous Pushkin Celebrations of 1937, the postwar jubilee was well rehearsed and artfully engineered. It included such preliminaries as an All-Union Pushkin Conference at the Institute of Russian Literature of the Academy of Sciences; a Joint Session of the Academy’s Literature and Language, and History and Philosophy Departments; the reopening following the restoration of the Pushkin memorial apartment, and the laying of the foundation of the Pushkin monument in Leningrad; the post-renovation inauguration of the Pushkin estate in Mikhailovskoe, in the Pskov region; and the opening of a Pushkin obelisk in Zakharovo, near Moscow. In the course of three months, Pushkin scholars around the country reportedly delivered 219 public lectures, while Leningrad curators conducted 300 excursions around the Pushkin Museum. Twenty-seven thousand people took part in these activities; 10,000 more gathered for a meeting at the Pushkin monument in Moscow a day before the poet’s birthday. These statistical data were documented in the Proceedings of the Anniversary Celebrations published by the Academy of Sciences. According to Konstantin Simonov, then laureate of four Stalin Prizes and editor-in-chief of Novyi Mir, the scope of the jubilee underscored the greatness of the “Stalin era, which for the first time in the history of humanity made […] Pushkin’s oeuvre the common property of all the people.”1 Although this was a common trope regarding other pre-revolutionary writers as well, Simonov’s speech had distinctive political relevance. He delivered these words on 6 June 1949, at the Pushkin Session at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, with Stalin present. Sitting in the presidium, the Generalissimo [End Page 63] again was the obvious other hero of the occasion. And yet there was a big difference between 1937 and 1949 concerning the nature of Stalin’s “glory.” After the war, Simonov and other speakers addressed their eulogies to Stalin the winner, laying words at his feet like the Victory Parade soldiers had laid the banners of the conquered enemy. War rhetoric permeated the Pushkin Celebrations of 1949. But however productive it is to consider the jubilee a spectacle of national recovery from war wounds,2 it was the Cold War that served as its underlying “trauma” and informed the speakers’ and journalists’ choices of arguments and tropes. Speaking of Pushkin’s “significance for the entire world,” Stalin’s ideologues, first and foremost, were referring to the geopolitical delineations recently established on a global scale. They also took into account the ongoing campaign against “servility toward the West” (nizkopoklonstvo pered zapadom),3 which was aimed at rooting out fascination with foreign arts and literature among Soviet citizens and curbing their awareness of Russia’s indebtedness to the Western cultural heritage. Seeking to detect and destroy the new “inner adversary” in Soviet society, the “servility” campaign had erected a wall between the Soviet intelligentsia and the people. My goal is to trace rhetorical outlines of these ideological boundaries [End Page 64] and compare them to Pushkin’s ideas about Russia’s relationship to Europe and a writer’s place within his or her society. Two keynote speakers at the Pushkin Session at the Bolshoy, Simonov and Aleksandr Fadeev, evoked Cold War alienation paradigms in their presentations. The first to speak, Fadeev attacked the “enemies of our socialist country, the enemies of their own nations, the lackeys of bourgeois culture, who […] cover their […] dependence on their coaches, the imperialists, with shrieks about ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy.’”4 These words, borrowed from newspaper editorials, were a standard contribution to the Soviet project of defining the external Cold War enemy. The other object of Fadeev’s concern was the Soviet intelligentsia, whom he believed to be exceptionally fortunate but not always vigilant or politically zealous. Only in the Soviet Union, Fadeev said, “do the people treat the intelligentsia so kindly and surround them with such love...

‘In the distance a light?’ – Contemporary Spanish Civil War Writing in New Zealand

Research into Contemporary Spanish Civil War Writing in New Zealand.

The Theme of peace and war in Virginia Woolf's war writings: essays on her political philosophy

Acknowledgments Introduction Karen L. Levenback PART ONE: WOOLF, WAR, AND GENDERED POLITICS The Value of Three Guineas in the Twenty-First Century - Eileen Barrett, California State University, East Bay Woolf and the War Machine - Gina Potts, Queen Mary, University of London Writing as Unraveling: Woolf's Gendered Decontruction of War - Lisa L. Coleman, Southeastern University PART TWO: WOOLF, WAR, AND IMAGE Photographing Violence: Three Guineas and Contemporary Feminist Responses to Images of War - Kimberly Engdahl Coates, Bowling Green State University Virginia Woolf in the Age of Aerial Bombardment - Stuart N. Clarke Mrs. Dalloway and the Art of Death: Monuments, Merchandise, and Memoirs - Danell Jones, Montana State University, Bozeman PART THREE: WOOLF, WAR, AND TRAUMA Pacifying Bloomsbury: Virginia Woolf, Julian Bell, and the Spanish Civil War - Emily Robins Sharpe, Pennsylvania State University Thinking Peace into Existence: Narrating Trauma and Mourning in Freud, Woolf, and Morrison - Noreen O'Connor, King's College What else can a gnat on a blade of grass do?: Thinking of War, Writing of Peace - Lolly Ockerstrom, Park University PART FOUR: WOOLF, WAR, AND PEDAGOGY The Echo Chambers of War in A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas: Teaching the Interconnection of Gender Oppression and Endless Warfare - Vara Neverow, Southern Connecticut State University Active Pacifism in a World at War: The Legacy of Virginia Woolf's Pacifist Theory on Narrative Structure - Nancy Knowles, Eastern Oregon University The Practical Wisdom of the Educated Man's Daughter: Feminist Rhetorical Theory and Woolf's Three Guineas - Kristen Garrison, Texas Woman's University Afterword by Jane M. Wood Notes on the Contributors.

Creating a History: The Case for Lawrence as a Civilian War Writer

One of the legacies of our last, violent century is how our reading of the literature of its formative period, the First World War and the rise of Modernism, is split between history and aesthetics, the “Georgian” war writers on one side and the Modernists on the other. As the “Men of 1914” the Modernists both emerged and were obliterated on the first year of war. Wyndham Lewis recalled how “It was, after all, a new civilisation that I—and a few other people—was making the blueprints for: the...

The War Discourses of William Ellery Channing: Pacifism and Just War in Antebellum American Religious Liberalism

William Ellery Channing, one of the most important theological figures of early nineteenth century America, produced a remarkable body of writings on war. These writings, spanning more than three decades, epitomize the moral and theological struggles of early progressive Christians around issues of peace and war. This paper argues that Channing's war writings are both a reflection of their time and ahead of their time. They are rooted in the social and political realities of antebellum America and in the early liberal theology that Channing himself helped to define, yet they anticipate several late twentieth-century developments in just war thinking and foreshadow many of the strategies advocated by contemporary proponents of the emerging “just peacekeeping” paradigm.

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II by Marina MacKay

MLR, 105.2, 2010 517 amoving account of the illusion and redundancy overshadowing Heinrich Dren dorfs apparent fulfilment.Writing in beautifully elegant German, Matz gives us in his linking of Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Stifter three interconnected reasons for thinking of 1857 as a seminal juncture formodern literature. Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen Ian Cooper The Cambridge Companion to the Literature ofWorld War IL Ed. by Marina MacKay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009. xx+234 pp. ?45 (pbk ?17.99). ISBN 978-0-521-88755-7 (pbk 978-0-521-71541-6). This Companion in the extensive Cambridge seriesmakes itsaims clear: to provide a comprehensive overview of the international literatures of thewar and to supply 'thenew reader with the tools needed for 'reading the literature of World War IF. The responsibilities are thus established and, with only 250 pages towork in, they are onerous. The international dimension recurs in the later essays on trauma theory and on theHolocaust, but I shall concentrate on the 'Global Perspectives' of Part 11. Here, my needs as a virtually 'new reader' were beautifully met by Debarati Sanyal's survey of 'The FrenchWar': valuable headings characterized thematerial, information was lucidly given, examples were well timed, and the structure re vealed the divisions and variations within that collective 'theFrench'. 'TheGerman War', however, the area perhaps ofmost ignorance to the British reader, devoted twelve pages to the topical question of the reluctance within Germany to take on thememory of theAllied destruction of its cities, Sebald's valuable offerings on this being a prompt for this author to take space from virtually everything anyone else wrote inGerman. Boll and Grass are discussed very briefly,yet the film-maker Wolfgang Staudte receives four detailed pages?'His combined documentary and artistic vision shared certain aspects of Sebald's attempts' (p. 103). Beside this travesty of an 'overview', unlike Sanyal who intelligently led us to deconstruct the false generality indicated by 'The FrenchWar', Dagmar Barnouw leaves intact the dangerously unscholarly collective 'The German', as in 'Only recently [. . .] have Germans begun to remember' (p. 101). On 'The Soviet War' Katharine Hodgson gives a useful account of the tightening and loosening of Soviet censorship but in her focus on the conditions ofwriting offers 'the new reader' few texts to follow up. Her surprising omission ofAkhmatova is symptomatic of a strange ignorance of poetry inmost of the 'Global' surveys. The otherwise excellent section on 'The JapaneseWar' by Reiko Tachibana has virtually no poetry in it;Donna Coates on 'War Writing inAustralia, Canada, and New Zealand' has virtually no space for the superb body of relevant poetry, but still finds room forone paragraph announcing its subject magnificently: 'Recently,war brides have appeared innovels and stories' (p. 159); and Robert S. C. Gordon, who does give a genuine survey on 'The Italian War', omits virtually all the poetry. Varying in emphasis, quality, and usefulness to the 'new reader', these 'Global Perspectives' are none the less supposedly all selected from a literary viewpoint. With such a viewpoint how can theCompanion findno place for the astonishingly 518 Reviews rich literature from 'The Polish* or 'TheHungarian' wars? If the coverage isworld wide, why are India and Africa (and that includes South Africa) not in this section? At the very least such selectivity should be boldly admitted and justified from the outset; as is the case with Gill Plain's later piece on 'WomenWriters and the War', which she acknowledges is on British writers (though once more poetry is not included). Of course suchmatters are of designation butwithin that, the potential purchaser's or reader's idea of the nature, scale, and coverage of the Companion is at stake. Part i concerns Anglo-American Texts and Contexts', and Imust preface my comments with an acknowledgement thatmost of theCompanion s authors far too rarelymake?my observations are personal and tentative as well as constrained by space. Rod Mengham's thoughtful essay on 'British Fiction of theWar' is limited towork produced during thewar. In contrast, JamesDawes's basic introduction to 'The American War Novel' concerns work mostly produced after i960. Margot Norris's similarly basic introduction to 'War Poetry in the USA' works from a formulaic selection of exemplary poems which brings its own...

The Private Lives of Systems: Rukeyser, Hayden, Middle Passage

The Private Lives of SystemsRukeyser, Hayden, Middle Passage Eben Wood (bio) Words at War Writing to New York Public Library trustee Henry James in the spring of 1943, Left poet Muriel Rukeyser proposed an exhibition that would examine what she and her colleagues in the Office of War Information's Graphics Division called "the nature of total war." The plan behind a series of single images may best be illustrated by such a series as the Graphics Division has carried out. The series on the Enemy does not show the Germans and the Japanese, for example, as brutalized and individual soldiers. It isolates a set of characteristics—suppression, starvation, slavery, torture, and murder—stamps them as the method of the enemy, and makes the positive answer of the United Nations: We Fight to Build a Free World. The qualities we fight against are contained in the images; the answer which implements daily life in America, as we wish to see it functioning to fight fascism, is contained in the text.1 Words at War, installed in a first-floor corridor of the NYPL's main branch on 5th Avenue, ran from June 18 to August 13, 1943. It was followed in the autumn by a weekly reading and discussion series whose participants included Rukeyser, exhibition coorganizer William Rose Benét, James Agee, W.H. Auden, Padraic Colum, Horace Gregory, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Kenneth Patchen, and William Carlos Williams [Fig. 1].2 In its critical juxtaposition of text and visual image, Words at War extended the Left avant-garde's earlier experimentation with the "social production of culture … and the new method of [End Page 201] literary representation / production that accompanied it, factography."3 As Benjamin H.D. Buchloch has argued, factography was the distillation of Soviet constructivism's effort not merely to apply modernism's technical innovations (particularly in film and photomontage) and formalist experimentation to a revolutionary context, but to involve artists "with materials and objects in actual space and the social processes that occur within it." In doing so, constructivists hoped to "transcend the historical limitations of modernism," moving from aesthetic mediation to direct participation in the processes of cultural production.4 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. E. McKnight Kauffer's cover design for the Words at War exhibition catalog (1943). The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Rejecting liberalism's presumptive private/public divide and its geopolitical analogies, Words at War contested many of the contradictions that emerged when earlier factographic and photomontage techniques were utilized in an already industrialized American context, contradictions that for Buchloch are exemplified by Herbert Bayer's photomurals for Edward Steichen's 1942 MoMA exhibition, Road to Victory. The site of Rukeyser's exhibition is significant in this regard: its location in the NYPL's main corridor and its disjunctive, pedagogical technique emphasized "useful information and technical instruction," in direct contrast to MoMA's contemporaneous "modernization of what had come to be known among museum professionals as the 'aesthetic theory of museum management.'"5 Likewise, Words at War retains a dialectical tension [End Page 202] between domestic American life and international fascism, implying that U.S. culture itself must be re-fashioned to counter totalitarianism both at home and abroad. Rather than channeling earlier leftwing political and artistic engagement directly into wartime propaganda, Rukeyser signals an ongoing conflict that emerged with the dismantling of the WPA, the move of "many arts projects participants … into the war information agencies," and the complex, mid-century transformation of American public culture.6 Expanding Buchloch's narrow focus on the plastic and visual arts, Rukeyser's contemporaneous literary work explored the ways in which—as it interrogated the divisions of cultural labor that separate poetic technique from visual communication, historical knowledge, and political action—"the program of productivism and the methods of factographic production" informed specific literary/artistic projects, decades before these methods found more direct expression in the mid- to late-1960s.7 In a globalizing postwar political landscape, domestic U.S. preoccupation with the production, transmission, and reception of networked information...