Women of War in Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark

Auster’s Man in the Dark includes numerous war stories that altogether contribute to its overall message about the different shape of the world if there were no wars. Most of these war stories are about the miscellaneous effective roles of women during wartime and its aftermath; their contributions to the progress of wars; their victimization as wives and captives; their sufferings as widows and laborers; and their drastic change of identity in accepting new social roles traditionally unachievable. These images of women of war make Man in the Dark a novel about women, although it literally seems not to offer any points about them. This paper is thus to argue that Auster seems to be presenting himself as a pro-feminist in this novel, which is basically about war and what causes war, in highlighting women’s roles during wartime and how their contributions have been unfairly silenced. Keywords: Auster, Man in the Dark, war, women.

War Stories? Analyzing Memoirs and Autobiographical Treatments Written by American Correctional Professionals

Over the past century, many American correctional professionals (including correctional officers, wardens, and support staff) have written memoirs and autobiographies that described their experiences working at one or more facilities. Although the number of books of this nature pales in comparison to those that have been written and published by convicts and exconvicts, enough of them have been released in order to warrant a more in-depth analysis. This article presents the results of a content analysis of 30 English language, American based memoirs/autobiographies published between 1996 and 2017, on 14 variables. Not only does this study contextualize these books, but it also provides an analytic framework for their review. The conclusion points out areas where continued scholarship on this topic may be conducted. In particular, the article argues that more first-hand treatments need to be conducted on the prison institution by current or former correctional professionals who have experience working inside correctional institutions.

“Write the world” and tell the stories of your ancestors

“As we dissect our war history, we discover previously untold or undocumented war stories of many Pacific people who served. Bringing to light these stories will allow a more complete history to be told of our country’s war efforts”.

Surgery on the battlefield: Mobile surgical units in the Second World War and the memoirs they produced

In the Second World War, there was a flowering of the battlefield surgery pioneered in the Spanish Civil War. There were small, mobile surgical units in all the theatres of the War, working close behind the fighting and deployed flexibly according to the nature of the conflict. With equipment transported by truck, jeep or mule, they operated in tents, bunkers and requisitioned buildings and carried out abdominal, thoracic, head and neck, and limb surgery. Their role was to save life and to ensure that wounded soldiers were stable for casualty evacuation back down the line to a base hospital. There is a handful of memoirs by British doctors who worked in these units and they make enthralling reading. Casualty evacuation by air replaced the use of mobile surgical units in later wars, throwing into doubt their future relevance in the management of battle wounds. But recent re-evaluations by military planners suggest that their mobility still gives them a place, so the wartime memoirs may have more value than simply as war stories.

THE IMAGE OF THE CIVIL WAR IN “TALES OF SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS” BY AMBROSE BIERCE

The article deals with the image of the Civil War in war stories by Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?). The specifics of the war's representation in writer's literary works are analyzed, the features of man at war are revealed. The particularity of the artistic world of stories by A. Bierce is recognized. The research is carried out on the material of the collection of short stories “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians” (1891): “Killed at Resaca” (1887), “A Son of the Gods” (1888), “One of the Missing” (1888), “A Tough Tussle”, (1888), “A Horseman in the Sky” (1889), “Chickamauga” (1889), “The Affair at Coulter's Notch” (1889), “The Coup de Grâce”, (1889), “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890), “Parker Adderson, Philosopher” (1891). The analysis is provided in the context of American Civil War literature of 1880s and 1890s and by taking into account writer's biography, a conclusion about the genre features of his literary works is also presented. The scientific novelty of the work is a complex analysis of early creativity of A. Bierce in the context of American military fiction.

Narratives of War

This chapter explores the ways in which individuals narrated, structured, and recalled their own wartime experiences, and those of their family. The first section analyses the military memoirs of two Royalist commanders, Sir Hugh Cholmley and Sir Richard Grenville. The second and third sections draw on the war stories contained in the petitions of maimed Parliamentarian soldiers and war widows. It argues that, in all three cases, subjects were principally concerned with curating an account of their wartime experiences that would reconcile the events of the past with their present identity, a task that combined partial, partisan remembering with a healthy dose of selective amnesia. It also considers the extent to which individual accounts were coloured by public memory, and demonstrates that though historians often make a conceptual distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ recollection, the boundary between these two categories was highly porous.