Literature and the Long Postwar: Recuperating the Post-45 Veteran
“Literature and the Long Postwar: Recuperating the Post-45 Veteran” examines the critical omission of the World War II veteran in literary studies. It argues that depictions of an aggrieved, often racialized veteran have been obscured for implying disapproval of a war that has been racially re-remembered and culturally protected as “good.” Retracing the World War II veteran in postwar cultural production elucidates a “problem” figure, for whom “readjustment” was a euphemistic slogan to encompass a variety of social, psychological, regional, racial, and sexual challenges. And yet, representations of anxious reentry have largely been smoothed over and replaced by the meta-narrative of the postwar good life and by canonical war literature focused on individual combat soldiers. As this study focuses on novels by N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, John Okada, and Louis Chu, it forces the distinction between war and postwar novels, and it analyzes the veteran as a strategic figure for embodying the discrepancies of American racial ideologies in theory versus practice. It reads the work of Flannery O’Connor as lamenting the status of white veterans maladjusted to the racial reform of the postwar South. Read together, reentry novels reveal how postwar writers responded to the war and the movements it catalyzed – such as decolonization, immigration reform, and civil rights – through the figure of the demobilized veteran. At the broadest level, this study identifies a set of tropes for the veteran’s portrayal, highlighting discourses of recuperative sexuality and representative patterns of displacement and removal. And it contends that a study of this kind is necessary given the framing of the field of contemporary literature, expressed through the shorthand of post-45.
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