[ecrea] New Book: Spectres of War

This new publication by Elisabeth Bronfen, professor of English and 
American Studies at the University of Zurich, may be of particular 
interest to colleagues working in film studies, American studies and/or 
militarisation and the media. Apologies for cross-posting.

SPECTERS OF WAR: Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict
Elisabeth Bronfen

Specters of War looks at the way war has been brought to the screen in 
various genres and at different historical moments throughout the 
twentieth century. Elisabeth Bronfen asserts that Hollywood has emerged 
as a place where national narratives are created and circulated so that 
audiences can engage with fantasies, ideologies, and anxieties that take 
hold at a given time, only to change with the political climate.

Such cultural reflection is particularly poignant when it deals with 
America’s traumatic history of war. The nation has no direct access to 
war as a horrific experience of carnage and human destruction; we 
understand our relation to it through images and narratives that 
transmit and interpret it for us. Bronfen does not discuss actual 
conflicts but the films by which we have come to know and remember them, 
including All Quiet on the Western Front, The Best Years of Our Lives, 
Miracle at St. Anna, The Deer Hunter, and Flags of Our Fathers. Battles 
and campaigns, the home front and women-who-wait narratives, war 
correspondents, and courts martial are also explored as instruments of 
cultural memory.

http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/specters_of_war.html