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Rethinking Trauma in US War Fiction

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Rethinking Trauma in US War Fiction University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses Spring August 2014 Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma in U.S. War Fiction Ruth A.H. Lahti University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the African American Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, Asian American Studies Commons, Cultural History Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, Feminist Philosophy Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, Military History Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other International and Area Studies Commons, Other Psychology Commons, Performance Studies Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, Theory and Philosophy Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Lahti, Ruth A.H., "Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma in U.S. War Fiction" (2014). Doctoral Dissertations. 106. https://doi.org/10.7275/eerx-v338 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/106 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma in U.S. War Fiction A Dissertation Presented By RUTH ANNE HARIU LAHTI Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2014 English © Copyright by Ruth Anne Hariu Lahti 2014 All Rights Reserved Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma in U.S. War Fiction A Dissertation Presented By RUTH ANNE HARIU LAHTI Approved as to style and content by: ____________________________________________ Laura Doyle, Chair ____________________________________________ Stephen Clingman, Member ____________________________________________ Sara Lennox, Member __________________________________________ Jenny Spencer, Department Head Department of English DEDICATION To Adam, now and always ACKNOWLEDGMENTS At this final stage of my dissertation project, I first want to express my gratitude to the members of my committee. Warm thanks to Laura Doyle, Stephen Clingman, and Sara Lennox for their guidance during this project and for the ways in which their own scholarship has inspired me. My special thanks go to my chair Laura, who has been an extraordinary mentor in all ways—helping me find my authentic voice as a literary scholar and teaching me that the spirit with which we undertake our work in this profession is as critical to our success as the content of that work. Thanks also to Deborah Carlin, who has been a generous mentor throughout my graduate career and whose influence has shaped this project. Many thanks to all of the supportive faculty and staff of the UMass English Department, the Graduate School, the Undergraduate Advising Office, and the Du Bois Library. I especially thank Wanda Bak for her expert assistance at every stage of the graduate program. My heartfelt gratitude goes to my graduate student peers—they have made me understand the transformative impact of working within a true community of scholars and teachers. I also thank my undergraduate mentors at James Madison University, whose encouragement paved the way to my graduate studies. Thank you to all the members of my Hariu and Lahti families, especially my parents Laird and Bethany Hariu for their early and ongoing support. Most of all, I thank my husband Adam, whose love, faith, and joyful spirit have sustained me every step of the way. v ABSTRACT TRANSNATIONAL GESTURES: RETHINKING TRAUMA IN U.S. WAR FICTION MAY 2014 RUTH ANNE HARIU LAHTI, B.A., JAMES MADISON UNIVERSITY M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Laura Doyle This dissertation addresses the need to "world" our literary histories of U.S. war fiction, arguing that a transnational approach to this genre remaps on an enlarged scale the ethical implications of 20th and 21st century war writing. This study turns to representations of the human body to differently apprehend the ethical struggles of war fiction, thereby rethinking psychological and nationalist models of war trauma and developing a new method of reading the literature of war. To lay the ground for this analysis, I argue that the dominance of trauma theory in critical work on U.S. war fiction privileges the "authentic" experience of the white, male American soldier-author, which inadequately accounts for total war's impact on women, ethnic minorities, non- Americans, and non-combatants on all sides of the battle. The literary text, I contend, can restore a view to the diversity of war experiences, and my methodology provides a model for recovering these overlooked perspectives: close-reading characters’ bodily gestures. I develop this method to resituate war as relational, always involving two or more participants who in the local encounter are differently vulnerable to operations of national power. In three sections of paired chapters, this method illuminates the transnational dimensions of canonical war fiction by Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien alongside vi fiction by authors not as fully associated with the genre: Susan O’Neill, Toni Morrison, Chang-rae Lee, and Jayne Anne Phillips. These authors represent World War I through Vietnam; yet, in order to emphasize my reorientation of trauma theory, the chapters are organized around particular stages of war trauma: the event of war, homecoming from war, and war trauma across generations. By prioritizing war's embodied interactions, this study moves away from trauma theory's grounding in a universal view of the singular subject toward a conception of war trauma as intersubjective and inflected by uneven material realities. In doing so, "Transnational Gestures" contributes a new perspective to current scholarly debates about how American literary studies can intersect postcolonial, world, and empire studies in ways that better attend to complex legacies of global violence and inequality. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...................................................................................................v ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................vi INTRODUCTION: TRANSNATIONAL TRAUMA AND THE BODY OF AMERICAN WAR FICTION...................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER PART 1: SITUATING THE SURVIVOR-AUTHOR 1. GESTURAL MIMICRY AND BREAKING THE FRAME OF THE THINGS THEY CARRIED............................................................................24 2. SUSAN O'NEILL, WOMEN'S VIETNAM WAR EXPERIENCE, AND DON'T MEAN NOTHING......................................................................................53 PART 2: "THE WORLD-IN-THE-HOME": THE AFTERMATH OF WAR AND THE PROBLEM OF HOMECOMING 3. THE HOMECOMINGS OF TOTAL WAR AND HEMINGWAY'S IN OUR TIME........................................................................................................91 4. TONI MORRISON'S HOME AND THE "ORIGINATING RACIAL HOUSE"...............................................................................................129 PART 3: TRANSPACIFIC POSTMEMORY: THE AFTERLIVES OF WAR TRAUMA 5. CHANG-RAE LEE'S A GESTURE LIFE, THE ASIAN AMERICAN BODY, AND THE CROSS-CURRENTS OF POSTMEMORY........................154 6. JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS'S LARK AND TERMITE AND THE BODIES OF MAGICAL REALISM...................................................................204 CONCLUSION................................................................................................................238 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................242 viii INTRODUCTION TRANSNATIONAL TRAUMA AND THE BODY OF AMERICAN WAR FICTION Far from being an inert, passive, noncultural and ahistorical term, the body may be seen as the crucial term, the site of contestation, in a series of economic, political, sexual, and intellectual struggles. --Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism As a metaphorical image, friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power. --Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection A. Overview Hurtling headlong into the twenty-first century, American literary studies has encountered the pressing need to "world" its literary histories, to situate the significance of American literature within its global contexts. The boundaries of our national literary landscape have been transformed by the ethical exigencies of 9/11, as a realization of the porosity of these conceptual boundaries also opens a view to the ways in which U.S. literature is imbricated in complex global landscapes of power. Thinking in this enlarged scale also prompts us to acknowledge another enlarged scale that fires the urgency of global thinking: that of total war, particularly as Clausewitz’s mid-nineteenth century description of total war has encountered the potentiality of total destruction in our nuclear age. Indeed, William Faulkner pointedly vocalizes this urgency
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