Supercarnal Productions

Anchoring this chapter is Philip Roth’s London life with Bloom and a set of new friends: Al Alvarez, critic, Harold Pinter, playwright, R. B. Kitaj, painter, Michael Herr, journalist, and Edna O’Brien, novelist. Roth enjoyed a culturally rich and satisfying life with Bloom, while working on The Professor of Desire. But he soon sensed the fraying of his relationship as Bloom became increasingly dependent on her daughter, the opera singer Anna Steiger. He soon began to work on adaptations, principally for Bloom but also for himself: one early attempt was his effort to adapt Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, her Gulag autobiography. Another, new development was Roth’s involvement with Janet Hobhouse, novelist, their affair transposed to The Counterlife. And by the late 1970s, Roth turned to the experiences of an isolated writer in the countryside and the impact of the Holocaust through the possible afterlife of Anne Frank expressed in The Ghost Writer. Roth’s relationship with the New Yorker editor Veronica Geng and the continued importance of his editor Aaron Asher are also formidable figures. Comments on Roth’s enigmatic relationship with his mother (who died suddenly in 1981) end the chapter but not before a detailed accounting of Roth’s many illnesses (including a 1989 quintuple bypass) and the debilitating impact of illness on his physical and mental health.

Who Is the Soldier? Documenting American “Grunts” from Dispatches to Restrepo

This article compares the ways Michael Herr in Dispatches (1977) and Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger in Restrepo (2010) represent American soldiers in the context of military professionalization following the establishment of the AVF. These works are seminal landmarks of the grunt's-eye-view genre, but they produce the average soldier's subjectivity and identity very differently and, in turn, foster different relationships between their American audiences and this figure. Herr, I argue, represents the “grunts” of Vietnam as we all while Restrepo’s directors portray the Army platoon in Afghanistan as a collective who?. I show how the subtle aesthetic changes to documenting the average infantryman reflect and enforce the logics of professionalization as well as the intensifying distance between the American public and those who fight America's wars.

Mémoires/Mémorial de guerre

Résumé Prenant comme objet les récits de la Guerre du Viêt-nam, « Mémoire/ Mémorial de guerre » analyse la mémoire sous les angles épistémologique et psychologique. Alors que Philip Caputo (A Rumor of War) cherche à légitimer son récit en faisant appel à l'authenticité de ses souvenirs, Michael Herr {Dispatches) et Tim O'Brien (GoingAfter Cacciato) s'interrogent sur la possibilité même de reconstituer les événements passés. C'est le travail même de la signifiance qu'ils questionnent, plutôt que la simple capacité du récit à reproduire le passé. L'article traite donc de la mémoire comme d'un lieu où le souvenir, l'imaginaire et la culpabilité se rencontrent dans un réseau complexe, régie par une logique souvent paradoxale.