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War in Literature: Characters
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In Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism, Tobin Siebers claims that modern criticism is a Cold War criticism. Postwar literary theory has absorbed the skepticism, suspicion, and paranoia of the Cold War mentality, and it plays them out in debates about the divided self, linguistic indeterminacy, the metaphysics of presence, multiculturalism, canon formation, power, cultural literacy, and the politics of literature. The major critical movements of the postwar age, Siebers argues, belong to three dominant phases of the Cold War era. The age of charismatic leadership characterized by Churchill, FDR, Stalin, and Hitler lies behind the preoccupation with "intention," "affect," and "impersonality" found in the New Criticism. The age of propaganda motivates the fascination with the guiles of language, undecidability, and deconstruction. The age of superpowers provides the dominant metaphor in the new historicism's analysis of the technology of power.
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[Analysis of three representative Vietnam War films (The Green Berets, Apocalypse now, and The killing fields) to determine if there is a common underlying mythic structure and if these films constitute a genre. The films were selected because each represents a distinct phase of the war. They were analyzed on three levels: environment, character and story-motif. The author found there were identical underlying structures which fit Levi-Strauss's structural theories. Bibliography]
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Uneasy and even catastrophic experience entered the cultural consciousness in the very first months of the war, without any separation between emotionally and existentially uncomfortable experience. More importantly, it was identified and described as an inalienable element of a person's everyday life, rather than as something that affects characters fighting a war in some abstract space created by propaganda.
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