French Literature Reviews - 2026
The Writing(s) of War in the United States, from the 1850s to the 1970s
Other Literary Studies
THE WRITING OF WAR IN THE UNITED STATES,
from the 1850s to the 1970s
Studies compiled by Anne GARRAIT-BOURRIER and Patricia GODI-TKATCHOUK
The history of American literature, much like American history itself, has been shaped by the crucible of recurring wars, forming a space of conflict where literary expression finds room to develop even as territorial identity is being defined. This “writing of war”—extended to Europe via the First and Second World Wars, and to the wider world through Vietnam—thus took on multiple forms for all those who contributed to this volume, precisely at a time when the subject, unbeknownst to them, was becoming so pressingly relevant.
The chosen theme has, in any case, allowed us to explore the traumas of an America built and developed amidst the turmoil of multiple conflicts, whose artists still manage to speak to us of the universality of their experience and continue to imprint the dimension of a shared memory into their works.
Cahiers de recherches du CRLMC
OCTOBER 2003
300 pages
ISBN 2-84516-226-X
20
Bookstore distribution: C.I.D.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD Anne GARRAIT-BOURRIER and Patricia GODI-TKATCHOUK
FICTIONAL WRITING AND PROSE NARRATIVES OF THE 19th AND 20th CENTURIES
Fictional writing and prose narratives of the 19th century
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Béatrice ALZAS The writing of war, the writing of the flesh in Nowhere Else on Earth by Josephine Humphreys
Susanne BERTHIER-FOGLAR Susan Shelby Magoffin’s travel journal and the Conquest of the West
Isabelle GUILLAUME Little Women: Writing war to secure its aftermath
Anne GARRAIT-BOURRIER The metaphorization and prophecy of war in Melville's tales: symbols and hyperboles of the North/South conflict
20th-century fiction
Ineke BOCKTING A Time of Civil Wars: Novels of the Civil Rights Movement
Christophe GELLY F. Scott Fitzgerald and war: writing the disaster, writing absence
Marie-Odile SALATI The wound in Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms
Sylvie MATHÉ “Some sort of trembling melody”: the background hum of war in J. D. Salinger
Éric RAMBEAU Catch-22, or war as a microcosm revealing the paranoia of a society
Anne-Cécile POTTIER-THOBY At the crossroads of three conflicts: the fine writing of Julien Green
Maximilien VEGA-RITTER The warlike avatars of male eros or the phantasmatic writing of war in The Red Badge of Courage
POETIC AND CINEMATIC WRITING
Poetic writing in the 19th and 20th centuries
Marc BELLOT “Spirit Whose Work is Done”: Walt Whitman and the dialectic of war
Éric ATHENOT With war and war's expression: Whitmanian writing put to the test of the Civil War
Philippe MAHOUX Can a stylistics of the Civil War poem be defined?
Patricia GODI-TKATCHOUK “It is a heart, / This holocaust I walk in”: anamnesis of war, or the unbearable in the poetry of Sylvia Plath
Geneviève COHEN-CHEMINET “Being a poet in times of crime”: Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust, Jerome Rothenberg’s Khurbn, Jerome Rothenberg and Arie Galles’s Fourteen Stations
Cinematic writing
René DUBOIS From Conrad to Coppola, or the mutation of the ethical mandala of Heart of Darkness into the political-military mandala of Apocalypse Now
Raphaëlle COSTA de BEAUREGARD Anti-belligerent discourse and war propaganda in cinematic war writing: the example of The Story of G.I. Joe, an American film by William Wellman (1945), and The Way Ahead, a British film by Carol Reed (1944)
André MURAIRE The Vietnam War in American cinema: rewriting America
The study of war literature often addresses how national identity is constructed through the lens of historical trauma and military engagement. This volume, The Writing of War in the United States, from the 1850s to the 1970s, explores the intersection of prose, poetry, and cinema from the 19th century to the 1970s. Readers interested in the evolution of American cultural identity and the representation of conflict in various artistic media may find these collected essays relevant to their research.
This collection situates the writing of war within the broader tradition of American letters, where the crucible of recurring conflict serves as a space for literary development. The contributors examine genres including travel journals, novels, and poetic works to investigate the metaphorization of violence. By tracing these themes from the 1850s through the 1970s, the volume explores how artists imprint the dimension of a shared memory into their work, including the writings of figures such as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, and J. D. Salinger.