Combat Death In Contemporary American Culture

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.

Arguing that death is the central force shaping our social life and order, Michael Kearl draws on anthropology, religion, politics, philosophy, the natural sciences, economics, and psychology to provide a broad sociological perspective on the interrelationships of life and death, showing how death contributes to social change and how the meanings of death are generated to serve social functions. Working from a social as well as a psychological perspective, Kearl analyzes traditional topics, including aging, suicide, grief, and medical ethics while also examining current issues such as the impact of the AIDS epidemic on social trust, governments' use of death symbolism, the business of death and dying, the political economy of doomsday weaponry, and death in popular culture. Incisive and original, this book maps the separate contributions of various social institutions to American attitudes toward death, observing the influence of each upon the broader cultural outlook on life.

The social and cultural changes of the last century have transformed death from an everyday fact to something hidden from view. Shifting between the practical and the theoretical, the professional and the intimate, the real and the fictitious, this collection of essays explores the continued power of death over our lives. It examines the idea and experience of death from an interdisciplinary perspective, including studies of changing burial customs throughout Europe; an account of a“dying party” in the Netherlands; examinations of the fascination with violent death in crime fiction and the phenomenon of serial killer art; analyses of death and bereavement in poetry, fiction, and autobiography; and a look at audience reactions to depictions of death on screen. By studying and considering how death is thought about in the contemporary era, we might restore the natural place it has in our lives.

Hollywood Remembrance and American War addresses the synergy between Hollywood war films and American forms of war remembrance. Subjecting the notion that war films ought to be considered ʻthe war memorials of today’ to critical scrutiny, the book develops a theoretical understanding of how Hollywood war films, as rhetorical sites of remembering and memory, reflect, replicate and resist American modes of remembrance. The authors first develop the framework for, and elaborate on, the co-evolution of Hollywood war cinema and American war memorialization in the historical, political and ideological terms of remembrance, and the parallel synergic relationship between the aesthetic and industrial status of Hollywood war cinema and the remembering of American war on film. The chapters then move to analysis of Hollywood war films – covering The Great War, World War II, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, The Cold War, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – and critically scrutinize the terms upon which a film could be considered a memorial to the war it represents. Bringing together the fields of film studies and memory studies, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in not just these areas but those in the fields of history, media and cultural studies more broadly, too.

This volume is a study of human entanglements with Nature as seen through the mode of haunting. As an interruption of the present by the past, haunting can express contemporary anxieties concerning our involvement in the transformation of natural environments and their ecosystems, and our complicity in their collapse. It can also express a much-needed sense of continuity and relationality. The complexity of the question—who and what gets to be called human with respect to the nonhuman—is reflected in these collected chapters, which, in their analysis of cinematic and literary representations of sentient Nature within the traditional gothic trope of haunting, bring together history, race, postcolonialism, and feminism with ecocriticism and media studies. Given the growing demand for narratives expressing our troubled relationship with Nature, it is imperative to analyze this contested ground. “Chapter 6” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The Anthropocene and the Undead describes how our experience of an increasingly erratic environment and the idea of the undead are more closely linked than the obvious zombie horde signaling the end of the world. In fact, as described here, much of how we understand the anthropocene both conceptually and in practice involves undead entities from the past that will not die, undead traumas that rise up and consume the world, and undead temporalities that can never end. Fifteen original essays by cultural and anthropological experts such as Kyle William Bishop, Nils Bubandt, Johan Höglund, and Steffen Hantke, among others, study the nature of humanity’s ongoing complicated relationship to the environment via the concept of the undead. In doing so, The Anthropocene and the Undead sheds invaluable light on adjacent concepts such as the Capitalocene, Necrocene, Disanthropocene, Post-anthropocene, and the Symbiocene to trace real and imagined trajectories of our more-than-human selves into undead and undying futures.

Religious Horror and the Ecogothic explores the intersections of Anglophone Christianity and the Ecogothic, a subgenre that explores the ecocritical in Gothic literature, film, and media. Acknowledging the impact of Christian ideologies upon interpretations of human relationships with the environment, the Ecogothic in turn interrogates spiritual identity and humanity’s darker impulses in relation to ecological systems. Through a survey of Ecogothic texts from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book illuminates the ways in which a Christianized understanding of hierarchy, dominion, fear, and sublimity shapes reactions to the environment and conceptions of humanity’s place therein. It interrogates the discourses which inform environmental policy, as well as definitions of the “human” in a rapidly changing world.

This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.