Innocence and Loss: Representations of War and National Identity in the United States
A fierce national outcry for righteously waging war has long dominated American culture. From at least the wildly popular Spanish-American War and the US military invasion of the Philippines that infuriated Mark Twain, right up to the current Global War on Terrorism, this is a deadly, dark current coursing throughout American history. Meanwhile, dissenting analyses of the “patriotic gore” have until recently been paid scant attention in the popular media.
Delving into this history, this probing collection of essays explores ways in which “the compulsive redeployment of innocence” in the launching, cheering, and retelling of America’s wars “endlessly defers a national reckoning,” as the editors astutely state in their introduction. The works in this collection reflect an effort to add more voices where they are desperately needed.
Cristina Alsina Rísquez has been teaching 20th-century US history and literature to graduate and undergraduate students in the English Department at the Universitat de Barcelona since 1994. Her most recent scholarship examines the work of the contemporary novelist Tim O’Brien, focusing on the formal and ideological complexities of the representation of “truth” in fiction. She is one of the researchers in the group “Dona i Literatura” (Women and Literature), which hosts the UNESCO Chair “Women, Development, and Culture” at the Universitat de Barcelona. She is currently co-directing the journal Lectora: Revista de dones i textualitat, and is the Secretary for the Spanish Association for American Studies (SAAS). In 2008, she spent a semester as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at Southern Connecticut State University.
Cynthia Stretch is a Professor of English at Southern Connecticut State University where she teaches 19th- and early 20th-century US literature. Her research centers on representations of class among politically committed authors on the left. Her work has appeared in Disclosing Intertextualities: The Short Stories, Plays, and Novels of Susan Glaspell and in American Literary Realism. Stretch was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the Universitat de Barcelona in 2005.
“Nearly a hundred years after the war to end all wars, there is no one left alive to remember the travesty that was that war, but we do have the writings of Wilfred Owen to describe the horrors of trench warfare and the suffocating death that gas brought. Historians have been trying to rewrite the Vietnam War since the last helicopter fled that roof top in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, but Vietnam veteran poets like Jan Barry have published works that force us to look deep into our nation’s soul at war. These writings that challenge the state’s dominant narrative about war are critical to the survival of democracy. If not for these writings and the crucial work of war journalists and scholars, we would only know the tall tales of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Nixon, Kissinger, and all the other war makers who never personally fight wars. I was able to tell my stories from Iraq because I had the help of veterans and supportive academics without whom I may well have just gone home and tried to forget the war. But the reality is that there is no forgetting war. War forever changes you and the only way to find the new you is to tell those stories, to write them, to sign them, to get them out there so that others may understand some of what you have gone through. The works in this book reflect an effort to add more voices where they are desperately needed.”
—Geoff Millard, Iraq Combat Veteran; Organizer and policy expert on Veteran Homelessness
“Delving into this history, this probing collection of essays explores ways in which ‘the compulsive redeployment of innocence’ in the launching, cheering and retelling of America’s wars ‘endlessly defers a national reckoning,’ as the editors astutely state in their introduction. … At long last, a determinedly dissenting side of American culture is emerging on war issues. Essays in this collection explore some of the seeds of that long evolution.”
—Jan Barry, US Army Veteran of Vietnam; Advisor to the Warrior Writers and Combat Paper Projects; Professor of Journalism at Ramapo College of New Jersey and St. Thomas Aquinas College
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