Going Scapegoat: Post-9/11 War Literature, Language and Culture

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Since 9/11, David Buchanan argues, the genre of war literature has become a
sufferable
and
suffering
feature of American popular culture. While there has long been a simmering critical debate regarding artistic depictions of war-who can write war literature, when he or she can do so-Buchanan wades right in to offer a new way to close-read war narratives. An experienced insider, Buchanan disavows the supposed epistemological power of war experience and the guiding ideology called
combat gnosticism
that has dominated the field. Couple this with a persistent popular preference for the combat narrative told by the combat experienced soldier, the potential of the genre to address the U.S. war system critically has been severely limited. Buchanan closely examines three war novels from 2012 that represent the United States’ military responses to 9/11 (Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, David Abrams’s FOBBIT, and Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds). Buchanan adapts Kenneth Burke’s scapegoat mechanism in order to offer a model for those who engage war literature and war films at a critical level. Favoring healthy ambivalence of certainty, the result is a method of critiquing war literature that ameliorates the limiting problems that accompany combat gnosticism itself.