War theory and literary practice: Hemingway, Salter, and O'Brien

This study begins with the proposition that war profoundly affects those it touches such that literary scholars should be able to discover traces of the war in most everything written by a veteran, even those works not directly about war or the military. The first chapter of Part I discusses the inherent although frequently overlooked complexity of analyzing any text about war or the military; proposes an interdisciplinary approach to textual interpretation dubbed war theory (also introduced in the preface); and critiques efforts by literary scholars to apply terms from literary-cultural studies (such as 'postmodernism') to military history. The second chapter of Part I reasserts the fundamental import of Ernest Hemingway's status as a veteran for understanding his works by exploring war's contribution to the performance of gender in his texts. For this chapter, war theory means the application of feminist and gender studies to the veteran's texts. Parts II and III employ war theory as well as textual explication and some biographical interpretation to the careers of James Salter and Tim O'Brien, both of whom write in dialogue with Hemingway. Part II places Salter in the context of other mid-century postwar writers and explores the relationship between his military career as a fighter pilot and his body of writing, using studies of fighter pilot psychology to help establish the connection. Part III locates O'Brien in a modernist rather than a postmodernist tradition and examines his writing from a variety of perspectives, including autobiography theory and anthropology. Gender issues are also treated for both Salter and O'Brien.