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War without Bodies
Framing Death from the Crimean to the Iraq War
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2022
About this book
Historically the bodies of civilians are the most damaged by the increasing mechanization and derealization of warfare, but this is not reflected in the representation of violence in popular media. In War Without Bodies, author Martin Danahay argues that the media in the United States in particular constructs a “war without bodies” in which neither the corpses of soldiers or civilians are shown. War Without Bodies traces the intertwining of new communications technologies and war from the Crimean War, when Roger Fenton took the first photographs of the British army and William Howard Russell used the telegraph to transmit his dispatches, to the first of three “video wars” in the Gulf region in 1990-91, within the context of a war culture that made the costs of organized violence acceptable to a wider public. New modes of communication have paradoxically not made more war “real” but made it more ubiquitous and at the same time unremarkable as bodies are erased from coverage. Media such as photography and instantaneous video initially seemed to promise more realism but were assimilated into existing conventions that implicitly justified war. These new representations of war were framed in a way that erased the human cost of violence and replaced it with images that defused opposition to warfare.
Analyzing poetry, photographs, video and video games the book illustrates the ways in which war was framed in these different historical contexts. It examines the cultural assumptions that influenced the reception of images of war and discusses how death and damage to bodies was made acceptable to the public. War Without Bodies aims to heighten awareness of how acceptance of war is coded into texts and how active resistance to such hidden messages can help prevent future unnecessary wars.
Analyzing poetry, photographs, video and video games the book illustrates the ways in which war was framed in these different historical contexts. It examines the cultural assumptions that influenced the reception of images of war and discusses how death and damage to bodies was made acceptable to the public. War Without Bodies aims to heighten awareness of how acceptance of war is coded into texts and how active resistance to such hidden messages can help prevent future unnecessary wars.
Author / Editor information
MARTIN A. DANAHAY is a professor of English at Brock University in Canada. He is the author of Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity and A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth Century Britain.
Reviews
"War Without Bodies contributes to an important and ongoing effort to understand—and to challenge— the myriad ways in which a culture of war has been historically normalized as a function of “new” technologies of representation. Martin Danahay illustrates how the illusion of a “war without bodies” complicates our capacity to engage the trauma of war by sanitizing its violence and undermining the very possibility of grieveable bodies, whether soldiers or civilians.
— John Louis Lucaites, co-editor of In/visible War: The Culture of War in Twenty-first-Century AmericaTopics
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Frontmatter
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Contents
ix -
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Introduction: two photographs
1 -
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Chapter 1 Sacrificial Bodies: fenton, tennyson, and the charge of the light brigade
18 -
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Chapter 2 The Soldier’s Body and Sites of Mourning
39 -
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Chapter 3 War Games
54 -
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Chapter 4 Trauma and the Soldier’s Body
69 -
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Chapter 5 Sophie Ristelhueber: landscape as body
85 -
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Conclusion: future war without bodies
103 -
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Acknowledgments
109 -
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Notes
111 -
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Works Cited
119 -
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Index
135 -
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About the Author
141
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 11, 2022
eBook ISBN:
9781978819238
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781978819238
Keywords for this book
derealization; warfare; civilian; civilian bodies; popular media; violence; violence in media; American media; United States media; soldiers; civilian casualties; corpse; war; dead bodies; The Dead Kennedys; Crimean War; Roger Fenton; army; photography; war photography; British army; Gulf war; war culture; organized violence; media coverage; realism; justified war; Iraq war; frames of war; human cost; images of war; anti-war; antiwar; media analysis; media studies; video games; violent video games; subliminal messages; peace; Charge of the Light Brigade; documenting war; mourning; war trauma; war games; fantasy wars; Dungeons and Dragons; virtual wars; virtual reality; PTSD; war politics; Sophie Ristelhueber; drone wars; gun violence; gory graphics; desensitization; war narrative; war prevention; media management; media censorship; war video games; war movies; war films; action movies; combat movies; combat video games; military movies; war drama; art of war; war management; management of violence; war videos
Audience(s) for this book
For universities and colleges of further and higher education
