Wandering in the ruins
I’ve noted Lara Feigel‘s wonderful The love-charm of bombs before, and now there’s a short interview with her at the New York Times Arts blog here: I was originally planning to write an academic study...
View ArticleAnother brick in the wall
When I was writing the Israel/Palestine chapters in The Colonial Present the vast, wretched landscape of occupation and repression was numbingly new to me (though it shouldn’t have been). I found...
View ArticleWar cultures
The British Academy is holding a two-day Landmark Conference in London on 12-13 November 2014, The First World War: Literature, Culture, Modernity. The conference is convened by Santanu Das and Kate...
View ArticleNovel wars
Since I added ‘The Natures of War’ to the DOWNLOADS section several people have asked me about my use of novels, especially in relation to Vietnam, while others have asked me to recommend writings –...
View ArticleThe trauma hero
Following up my earlier post on novels, memoirs and narratives of war, there’s a thoughtful discussion by Roy Scranton at the LA Review of Books on what he calls ‘the myth of the trauma hero’. A boy...
View ArticleAll the ways we kill and die
I’ve noticed Brian Castner‘s astonishing work before – see my post here – and I’m now deep into his latest book (published on my birthday). I’ll write a detailed response when I’m finished, but it is...
View ArticleWar Stories
Thursday 15 September 7 – 9.30 p.m. on the Goldcorp Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre – 162 West 1st Avenue, Vancouver: War stories from Afghanistan, Iraq and other conflict zones told by foreign...
View ArticleViolence and imagination
While I was working on ‘Gabriel’s Map’ (DOWNLOADS tab) Trevor Barnes introduced me to Tom McCarthy‘s mesmerising novel C which, among many other things, contains some extraordinary passages describing...
View ArticleThe aesthetics of drone warfare
A conference at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield (UK), 7-8 February 2020, organised by Beryl Pong – Vice Chancellor’s Fellow in English at the University of Sheffield –...
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