Moreover, public concern within the United States over the rationales offered for sustaining or ending wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East have brought the experiences and perspectives of veteran Americans into public debates in new ways, whether they be voiced by literary celebrities like National Book Award winner and frequentNew York Times columnist Phil Klay or recently elected officials like Senators Tammy Duckworth and Martha McSally. The strategies and conditions of U.S. military actions abroad are increasingly perceived in domestic arenas like policing, racialized systems of privilege, and a divisive public sphere, making the experiences of a returned soldier a synecdoche for larger political critiques.
In many ways, veteran artists find themselves in positions akin to those of minority writers in the 1960s and 70s, burdened by the expectation of ethnographic representation and constrained by stereotypes about military service in relation to race, sexuality, gender, education, and politics. These discursive pressures have led to both innovations in creative work and critical questions about a literary civilian-military divide. In the terms of the Presidential Theme for the 2020 convention, veteran writers who take war, its effects, and its aftermath for their subjects are presumed to have particular insight in addressing what it means to be human in the most extreme conditions. Critical approaches to their works, such as those listed in the first paragraph, have emphasized literature’s ability to inculcate and indict moral responsiveness or the lack thereof. Critics have also described veteran creative work as self-conscious attempts to enact literature’s claims on the public sphere by using it to explore politically directed violence.
This panel maps the ways in which creative work by veterans navigates popular and critical versions of the civilian-military divide. The assumption that veteran literature can serve an ethnographic or instructive function for civilian readers merits scrutiny on numerous grounds, and this panel provides a range of perspectives on how literary history, form, and genre shape the production and reception of contemporary war literature.
The first presentation creates a bridge between contemporary discussions of literature’s moral efficacy in the representation of war and a debate in the 1930s between WWI veterans Archibald MacLeish and Malcom Cowley regarding the moral responsibilities of veteran writers in the run-up to WWII. Cowley emphasized the moral obligation of artists to tell only stories that did the political work of anti-war protest, whereas MacLeish mounted a defense of the right of artists to speak only to individual experiences, no matter how apolitical or politically inconvenient the resulting narratives might be. By subjecting MacLeish’s justification of apolitical war stories to panel respondent Roy Scranton’s 2015 critique of moral obtuseness in contemporary veteran-authored war fiction (“The Trauma Hero: From Wilfred Owen to ‘Redeployment’ and ‘American Sniper’,” Los Angeles Review of Books), this presentation surveys the literary history of debates about the moral and aesthetic obligations of war stories and maps the current form of that debate.
The second presentation describes two effects of the post-Vietnam All-Volunteer-Force on American war fiction. First, while male combat veterans dominated fictions that emerged in the wake of Vietnam, the contemporary proportion of civilians publishing fiction about Iraq and Afghanistan nearly equals the output of veterans. This mixture suggests shifts in the standards of authority for contemporary war authorship that impacts the historically privileged position of the veteran’s voice. The second change involves narrative strategy. While Vietnam veterans tended to focus on the traumatization of the individual American soldier while rhetorically dehumanizing the Vietnamese people, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have largely adopted a multi-voiced approach that includes the perspective of groups, like civilian nationals, who have been traditionally denied their own story in the American narrative of war. These shifts create crosscurrents in the reception of veteran writing.
The third presentation traces the depiction of veterans in eighteenth and nineteenth-century American literature to describe the origins of an epistemically limited purview for veteran writing. At the end of the nineteenth century, the knowledge attributed to literary veterans originated in a foot soldier’s narrow scope of vision, and included the physiological effects of violence, psychic trauma, bonds between imperiled or violated comrades, and bitterness toward a callous or uninformed chain of command. Such narrowly existential and apolitical knowledge increasingly became the hallmark of writing recognized as “war literature.” The presentation then pivots to explain how such epistemic conditions, as elucidated by philosopher Miranda Fricker, shape the largely existential and apolitical creative works of contemporary veterans. In this, the presentation provides a counterpoint to the first one.
Acclaimed novelist, provocative scholar, polymath public intellectual, and veteran Dr. Roy Scranton is the ideal respondent for this critical conversation since he is both an influential framer and a literary subject of it. All of the panelists already have complete drafts of their presentations since they are drawn from larger works, and the respondent will have ample time to craft succinct and focused comments to preface open discussion.
The panelists include faculty from all academic ranks and a graduate student and are drawn from public and private universities and from both teaching-focused institutions and research-focused ones. Three participants are veterans of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with publications in creative writing and public scholarship.
Three fifteen-minute presentations and one ten-minute response will leave fifteen minutes for open discussion after five minutes of introductions.