The Trauma Hero and the Lost War: World War II, American Literature, and the Politics of Trauma, 1945-1975

Abstract

The Trauma Hero and the Lost War: World War II, American Literature, and the Politics of Trauma, 1945–1975 investigates the canonical dominance of trauma narratives in American literary representations of World War II, and works to understand the problem of the hero in American World War II literature as a question of the role of metaphor in wartime political imaginaries. Among the issues I consider are the trauma hero in war literature, the metaphor of the hero in Wallace Stevens and James Jones, representations of bomber crews as sacrificial victims in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the poetry of Randall Jarrell, and the rejection of heroism in the comic poetry of Kenneth Koch.