Journal Article

The New Heroism

Wexler, Joyce

2015

Overview

Kathryn Bigelow, director of the academy-award winning film The Hurt Locker (2008), ponders the current idea of heroism from the soldier's perspective: \"War's dirty little secret is that some men love it. (War Imagined xii) Modris Eksteins argues that this myth replaced the public's memory of the war itself. Since Remarque's view of the war was shared by so many, readers accepted it as the \"truth\" about the war: \"The novel became enormously successful not because it was an accurate expression of the front-line soldier's war experience, but because it was a passionate evocation of current public feeling, not so much even about the war as about existence in general in 1929\" (362). [...]if the World War I analogue is intended to diminish Marrow's heroism by showing that it is more individualist than patriotic, the parallel has the opposite effect. Since Yeats allows his speaker the self-awareness that Marrow lacks, the analogy lends Marrow the stature of the reflective Irish airman. Web. http://books.google.com/books?id=CUgJAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=ed mund+burke+on+the+sublime&hl=en&sa=X&ei=a6fJUsayD-nWyQHskYEY&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA# v=onepage&q=edmund%20burke%20on%20the%20sublime&f=false Cohen, Milton A. \"Fatal Symbiosis: Modernism and World War I.\" War, Literature, and the Arts 8 (1996): 1-46.

• Publisher: War, Literature, & the Arts
• Subject: Hersey, John (1914-1993) / Klay, Phil / Remarque, Erich Maria (1898-1970)