•"Jon Robert Adams’s timely study of war literature
does what academic criticism at its best should do: influence our
actual lives. By tracing the disjunction between military experience
and expectations expressed in stories about war, including those
about present conflicts, Male Armor provides something
we really need—a means of thinking beyond private ideas and
public policies that too often destroy people."
—Marilyn Wesley, Hartwick College, author of Violent Adventure:
Contemporary Fiction by American Men
|
Male Armor:
The Soldier-Hero in Contemporary American Culture |
| |
| Jon Robert Adams |
| 176 pages, 6 x 9 |
| Cloth 978-0-8139-2752-7 • $49.50 |
| Paper 978-0-8139-2753-4 • $17.50 |
| Cultural
Frames, Framing Culture |
| September 2008 |
 |
There is no shortage of iconic masculine imagery of the soldier
in American film and literature—one only has to think of
George C. Scott as Patton in front of a giant American flag, Sylvester
Stallone as Rambo, or Burt Lancaster rolling around in the surf
in From Here to Eternity. In Male Armor, Jon
Robert Adams examines the ways in which novels, plays, and films
about America’s late-twentieth-century wars reflect altering
perceptions of masculinity in the culture at large. He highlights
the gap between the cultural conception of masculinity and the
individual experience of it, and exposes the myth of war as an
experience that verifies manhood.
Drawing on a wide range of work, from the war novels of Ernest
Hemingway, Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Joseph Heller to David
Rabe’s play Streamers and Anthony Swofford’s
Jarhead, Adams examines the evolving image of the soldier
from World War I to Operation Desert Storm. In discussing these
changing perceptions of masculinity, he reveals how works about
war in the late twentieth century attempt to eradicate inconsistencies
among American civilian conceptions of war, the military’s
expectations of the soldier, and the soldier’s experience
of combat. Adams argues that these inconsistencies are largely
responsible not only for continuing support of the war enterprise
but also for the soldiers’ difficulty in reintegration to
civilian society upon their return. He intends Male Armor
to provide a corrective to the public’s continued investment
in the war enterprise as a guarantor both of masculinity and,
by extension, of the nation.
Jon Robert Adams is Associate Professor
of English at Western Michigan University.
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