Are Stephen Crane and Ambrose Bierce the Inventors of the American "Anti-War" Story?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2019.i13.557Keywords:
Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Anti-war novelAbstract
Drawing on premises more extensively developed elsewhere concerning the impossibility for war narratives to live up in a consistent way to their desire of delivering an anti-war lesson, the essay debates the extent to which Stephen Crane and Ambrose Bierce may be considered as the founders of a new, typically modern literary form—the anti-war story. After illustrating why such claim may be considered both valid and invalid, the essay turns to what would seem to be Bierce’s most uncompromisingly shocking and critical war story he ever wrote, “Chickamauga.” By intelligently playing off the deaf-mute child’s perspective against the narrator’s viewpoint, Bierce succeeds in de-sublimating war, puncturing the chivalric ideal with a tableau of grotesque violence. However, one must still wonder whether the shock generated by the gruesome spectacle of war may be considered as a critical appraisal of violence, or simply an emotional response that has not much to offer in terms of understanding the historical circumstances that generate violence in the first place.References
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Bierce, Ambrose. Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. San Francisco: E.L.G. Steele, 1891.
Binder, Henry. “The Red Badge of Courage Nobody Knows.” The Red Badge of Courage. By Stephen
Crane. Ed. Henry Binder. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982. 111-58.
Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. Vol. 2. New York: Random House, 1974.
Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
---. “War, Response, and Contradiction.” The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. 234–57.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “War.” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. 11. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1904. 151–76.
Fiedler, Leslie. “The Antiwar Novel and the Good Soldier Schweik.” Foreword to The Good Soldier Schweik.
By Jaroslav Hašek. New York: New American Library, 1963. v–xiv.
Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Avon, 1978.
Hoffmann, Bettina. “Focalization in Ambrose Bierce’s ‘Chikamauga.’” The Ambrose Bierce Project Journal
1.1 (Fall 2005). http://www.ambrosebierce.org/journal1hofmann.html. Last visited May 22, 2019.
James, William. “The Moral Equivalent of War.” Writings, 1902–1910. Ed. Bruce Kuklick. New York: Library
of America, 1987.
Jameson, Frederic. “Utopia and Reification in Mass Culture.” Social Text 1 (1979): 130–48.
---. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1981.
Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture. 1880–
1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981.
Mariani, Giorgio. Le parole e le armi. Saggi su guerra e violenza nella letteratura e cultura degli Stati Uniti
d’America. Milano: Marcos y Marcos, 1996.
---. “Mission of Mercy/Mission of Murder: Saving Private Ryan e la cultura dei Baby Bombers.” Ácoma.
Rivista internazionale di studi nord-americani 18 (inverno 2000): 23-32.
---. Waging War on War. Peacefighting in American Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.
Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso, 2013.
Poirier, Richard. Poetry and Pragmatism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Rosenwald, Lawrence, ed. War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar & Peace Writing. New York:
The Library of America, 2016.
Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies, Vol. 1. Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987.
Trumbo, Dalton. Johnny Got his Gun. New York: Bantam, 1970.
Weatherford, Richard M., ed. Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.
“William Tecumseh Sherman.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genereal_Sherman.
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2019-06-01
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