Combat Death in Contemporary American Culture

Popular Cultural Conceptions of War since World War II

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781793634962
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Popular Culture, War, and Post–World War II America
• 1 Melodrama, Dying, and the Sacred: The Cult of Iwo Jima
• 2 Melodrama Queered: The Outsider (1961) and The Portable War Memorial (1968)
• 3 Melodramatizing Iwo Jima in the Twenty-First Century: James Bradley’s and Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers
• 4 Adventure, Killing, and the Pleasures of War: Robin Moore’s The Green Berets (1965)
• 5 Adventure Revisited: Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977) and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014)
• 6 Horror, Irony, and the Anti-War Novel: Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers
• 7 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
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author