What War Poetry Means For Today’s Veterans

With the study of contemporary war poetry’s impact, Adrian Bonenberger — author of the war memoir “Afghan Post” — said that this is a very exciting time for potential poets.

War poetry is a form of memoir for service members who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

 

 

Source: What War Poetry Means For Today’s Veterans

Tunneling Forward: Remembering the Iraq War through the Poetry of Hugh Martin

The Stick Soldiers sets the precedent for all future accounts of war in poetic form. Groundbreaking in its honesty, necessary ugliness, and compellingly executed intertwining of imagery, emotion, and story, this is a stunning first book.

Source: Tunneling Forward: Remembering the Iraq War through the Poetry of Hugh Martin

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Contemporary Literature of the Forever Wars | An MLA 2016 Austin Roundtable

Source: Contemporary Literature of the Forever Wars | An MLA 2016 Austin Roundtable

Welcome to the website for a potential panel on the contemporary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at MLA 2016 in Austin. We will post more information soon.

 

Our invited scholars consider a series of complex, interrelated questions:

  • What are the appropriate critical, disciplinary, and theoretical terms for framing the recent boom in war fiction, memoir, poetry, and reportage?
  • What are the appropriate forms for addressing the questions of visibility, racialization, or gender disturbances?
  • To what extent do fiction, memoir and poetry connect the experience of individual combatants to national ideologies and agendas, to empathetic awareness of Iraqi and Afghan non-combatants and culture, or to direct or implied culpability for sinister aspects of contemporary war such as drone strikes, rendition, and enhanced interrogation techniques?
  • How have the wars been represented in national literatures other than the United States?
  • How have new technologies and doctrines of war—from insurgency and counterinsurgency to IEDs, drones, and torture—been rendered in literature?
  • How has the all-volunteer military changed the dynamic between citizen and soldier, insider and outsider?
  • How have the experiences, technologies, and personnel of war cross-pollinated within the borders of the United States?
  • How do we situate the current war corpus within the critical genealogies of war literature?