Against Embedded Literature: Brian Turner’s Iraq War Poetry

Authors

  • Giorgio Mariani

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2020.i16.924

Keywords:

Brian Turner, war poetry, Iraq war, Cosmopolitanism, American literature

Abstract

Brian Turner has quickly risen as the US poet of the Iraq War. Though many have praised his work on both aesthetic and political grounds, others have objected to his inability to move beyond an American soldier’s perspective. My essay explores the terms of this controversy, suggesting that Turner does—at least at times—try to incorporate in his poetry the viewpoint of the enemy. My argument is that Turner’s work could be described as “cosmopolitan,” at least if by that term we mean, as Bruce Robbins has suggested, not an impossibly “neutral” perspective but, more realistically, “a striving to transcend partiality that is itself partial” (1992, 181).

 

Author Biography

  • Giorgio Mariani

    Giorgio Mariani (giorgio.mariani@uniroma1.it) teaches American literature at the Sapienza University of Rome. He is editor-in-chief of RIAS-The Review of International American Studies. He has worked for many years on war literature and the relation between literature and violence. He is the editor of Le parole e le armi. Saggi su guerra e violenza nella letteratura e cultura degli Stati Uniti d’America (Milano: Marcos y Marcos, 1996) and of a special issue of the journal Ácoma on “Gli Stati Uniti e le guerre del nuovo millennio” (Nuova Serie, vol. 11, 2016). His last book is Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

References

Antoon, Sinan. “Embedded Poetry: Iraq; Through a Soldier’s Binoculars,” Jadaliyya 11 June 2014. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18082/embedded-poetry_iraq;-through-a-soldiers-binocular. All websites were visited on 28/11/2020.

Barkawi, Tarak. Globalization and War. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.

Bishop, James Gleason. “‘We Should Know These People We Bury in the Earth’: Brian Turner’s Radical Message.” War, Literature, and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities 22.1 (2010): 299-306.

Brown, Keith and Catherine Lutz. “Grunt-lit: the participant-observers of empire.” American Ethnologist 34 (2007): 322-28.

Colla, Elliott. “The Military-Literary Complex.” Jadaliyya 8 July 2014. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18384/the-military-literary-complex.

Dimock, Wai-chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Engelhardt, Tom. The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s. Chicago: Haymarket, 2010.

Filkins, Dexter. The Forever War. New York: Knopf, 2008.

Gallagher, Matt and Roy Scranto, edited by. Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2013.

Gupta, Saman. Imagining Iraq: Literature in English and the Invasion of Iraq. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011.

Hamill, Sam, edited by. Poets against the War. New York: Nation Books, 2003.

Hollis, Matthew and Paul Keegan, edited by. 101 Poems Against War. London: Faber and Faber, 2013.

Hynes, Samuel. The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. New York: Penguin, 1997.

London, Rick and Leslie Scalapino, edited by. enough. Okland, CA: O Books, 2003.

Mariani, Giorgio. Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

Metres, Philip. Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007.

Peebles, Stacey. Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier’s Experience in Iraq. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011.

Robbins, Bruce. “Comparative Cosmopolitanism.” Social Text 31-32 (1992): 169-86.

---. Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012.

Rowe, John Carlos. Literary Culture and U.S Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Sacks, Sam. “First-Person Shooters. What’s Missing in Contemporary War Fiction.” Harper’s Magazine August 2015. http://harpers.org/archive/2015/08/first-person-shooters-2/.

Scranton, Roy. “The Trauma Hero: From Wilfred Owen to ‘Redeployment’ and ‘American Sniper.’” Los Angeles Review of Books 25 January 2015. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trauma-hero-wilfred-owen-redeployment-american-sniper/.

Swift, Todd. 100 Poets Against the War. Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2003.

Turner, Brian. Here, Bullet. Highgreen: Bloodaxe, 2005.

---. Phantom Noise. Highgreen: Bloodaxe, 2010.

---. “Verses in Wartime (Part 2: From the Home Front).” New York Times 24 October 2007. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/verses-in-wartime-part-2-from-the-home-front.

“Veterans and Criminal Justice.” Swords to Plowshares, 2011. http://www.swords-to-plowshares.org/wp-content/uploads/Veterans-and-Criminal-Justic-Literature-Review.pdf

Weil, Simone. The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force. Trans. Mary McCarthy. Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1956.

Williams, Timothy. “Suicides Outpacing War Deaths for Troops.” New York Times 8 June 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/09/us/suicides-eclipse-war-deaths-for-us-troops.html?_r=0.

Downloads

Published

2020-12-17

Issue

Section

Articles (general section) - American language, literature, and culture