Ispisivanje rata: prostor i nasilje u romanu Michaela Herra Izvještaji s bojišta
Mapping War: Space and Violence in Michael Herr's Dispatches

Summary/Abstract: The American war experience in Vietnam was marked not only by a direct and explicit conflict, but also by highly stratified social and cultural changes. Accordingly, the literature that emerged from that period inevitably became a kind of intersection between the brutality of war and the American society. As an outstanding representative of the literary production of the period, Michael Herr through his fictional but also documentary writing style creates narratives that appropriately describe the initial efforts and subsequent collapse of the U.S. (neo) colonial intentions. The purpose of this analysis is to point out the author's distinctive ways of defining spatiality of war by inscribing himself (as a reporter) and the American soldiers as participants not only of the war but also of a broader social process which will in turn become a kind of national anxiety. The depicted violence surpasses its own contextual and documentary nature and becomes a diachronic overview of the loss of "American innocence".

• Details
• Contents