How We Are Changed by War: A Study of Letters and Diaries from Colonial Conflicts to Operation Iraqi Freedom / Edition 1

by D.C. Gill

Overview

The prolonged conflict in Iraq has shown us war’s transformative effect. Civilians rivet themselves to events happening halfway around the world, while young soldiers return home from battlefields, coping with the memories of those events.

How We Are Changed by War examines our sense of ourselves through the medium of diaries and wartime correspondence, beginning with the colonists of the early seventeenth century, and ending with the diaries and letters from Iraqi war vets. The book tracks the effects of war in private writings regardless of the narrator’s historical era allowing the writers to ‘speak’ to each other across time to reveal a profound commonality of cultural experience. Finally, interpreting the narratives by how the writers conveyed the content adds a richer layer of meaning through the lenses of psychology and literary criticism, providing a model for any society to examine itself through the medium of its members’ informal writings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415873116
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/05/2010
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Diana C. Gill is an independent scholar with a PhD in English from the University of Mississippi at Oxford.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Awareness and Selfhood

Self and Society

War and the Use of Stories

Wartime Function of Letters and Diaries

Limitations to Bearing Witness

1 The Metes and Bounds of Narrative and Self 19

Language and Limits of Narrative Identity

Cultural Narrative, Identity, and a Common Reality

Self-Narrative and Identity

Narrative of Self and Limits of Genre

The Transmission of a Cultural Narrative

2 An Opportunity for Change: War and Ambition 37

The Subtext of Traumatic Self-Narrative

The Interdependence of Self and Group

Seduction by a Narrative Past

Expectations, Deconstructions, and Glamour

Reconstruction

3 Conversion 71

Whetting the War Appetite: Myths and Archetypes

The Death of die Civilian Self

A Conflict-Oriented Realignment of Boundaries

4 A Growing Estrangement 114

Disillusionment and Bearing Witness

Divisive Viewpoints

An Invalidation of Sacrifices

The Betrayal of Performance

A Confusion of Roles

5 The Complexity of Spectatorship 147

A Shift in Performance Parameters

Forced Behind the Spotlights: "Seeing"

Forced Behind the Spotlights: "Being"

A Place for the Civilian on the Wartime Stage

6 Eye of the Storm 194

The Other Side of War

Alone in a Patriotic Crowd

Ripping Away of the Home Front

7 A Continuing Aftermath 237

Challenges to Veteran Reintegration

Cultural Evolution by War Confessions

Cultural Evolution by War Repression

Redemption in the Wilderness

Bibliography 275

Index 287