"In our imaginations, war is the name we give to the extremes of
violence in our lives, the dark dividing opposite of the connecting
myth, which we call love. War enacts the great antagonisms of
history, the agonies of nations; but it also offers metaphors for
those other antagonisms, the private battles of our private lives,
our conflicts with one another and with the world, and with
ourselves." Samuel Hynes knows war personally: he served as a
Marine Corps pilot in the Pacific Theater during World War II,
receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross. He has spent his life
balancing two careers: pilot and professor of literature. Hynes has
written a number of major works of literary criticism, as well as a
war-memoir, Flights of Passage, and several books about the World
Wars. His writing is sharp, lucid, and has provided some of the
most expert, detailed, and empathetic accounts of a disappearing
generation of fighters and writers. On War and Writing offers for
the first time a selection of Hynes's essays and introductions that
explore the traditions of war writing from the twentieth century to
the present. Hynes takes as a given that war itself--the
battlefield uproar of actual combat--is unimaginable for those who
weren't there, yet we have never been able to turn away from it. We
want to know what war is really like: for a soldier on the Somme; a
submariner in the Pacific; a bomber pilot over Germany; a tank
commander in the Libyan desert. To learn, we turn again and again
to the memories of those who were there, and to the imaginations of
those who weren't, but are poets, or filmmakers, or painters, who
give us a sense of these experiences that we can't possibly know.
The essays in this book range from the personal (Hynes's experience
working with documentary master Ken Burns, his recollections of his
own days as a combat pilot) to the critical (explorations of the
works of writers and artists such as Thomas Hardy, e. e. cummings,
and Cecil Day Lewis). What we ultimately see in On War and Writing
is not military history, not the plans of generals, but the
feelings of war, as young men expressed them in journals and poems,
and old men remembered them in later years--men like Samuel Hynes.
General
Imprint: |
University of Chicago Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
March 2018 |
Authors: |
Samuel Hynes
|
Dimensions: |
216 x 140 x 18mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover
|
Pages: |
224 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-226-46878-5 |
Categories: |
Books >
Social sciences >
Warfare & defence >
General
|
LSN: |
0-226-46878-X |
Barcode: |
9780226468785 |
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