On War and Writing

1,995.00

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Product Description

     “In our imaginations,
war is the name we give to the extremes of violence in our lives, the dark dividing opposite of the connecting myth, which we call
love. War enacts the great antagonisms of history, the agonies of nations; but it also offers metaphors for those other antagonisms, the private battles of our private lives, our conflicts with one another and with the world, and with ourselves.”
 
Samuel Hynes knows war personally: he served as a Marine Corps pilot in the Pacific Theater during World War II, receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross. He has spent his life balancing two careers: pilot and professor of literature. Hynes has written a number of major works of literary criticism, as well as a war-memoir,
Flights of Passage, and several books about the World Wars. His writing is sharp, lucid, and has provided some of the most expert, detailed, and empathetic accounts of a disappearing generation of fighters and writers.
           
On War and Writing offers for the first time a selection of Hynes’s essays and introductions that explore the traditions of war writing from the twentieth century to the present. Hynes takes as a given that war itself—the battlefield uproar of actual combat—is unimaginable for those who weren’t there, yet we have never been able to turn away from it. We want to know what war is really like: for a soldier on the Somme; a submariner in the Pacific; a bomber pilot over Germany; a tank commander in the Libyan desert. To learn, we turn again and again to the memories of those who were there, and to the imaginations of those who weren’t, but are poets, or filmmakers, or painters, who give us a sense of these experiences that we can’t possibly know.
           The essays in this book range from the personal (Hynes’s experience working with documentary master Ken Burns, his recollections of his own days as a combat pilot) to the critical (explorations of the works of writers and artists such as Thomas Hardy, E. E. Cummings, and Cecil Day-Lewis). What we ultimately see in
On War and Writing is not military history, not the plans of generals, but the feelings of war, as young men expressed them in journals and poems, and old men remembered them in later years—men like Samuel Hynes.

Review

“Perhaps no American scholar is better equipped to bridge the divide between martial life and literary culture than Samuel Hynes. . . . Mr. Hynes’s prose is crisp and edifying without crossing into the didactic or academic. His ability to explicate how war culture can absorb antiwar pronouncements is particularly striking. . . . Every year, Memorial Day tempts us into believing that the best way to honor the fallen is to exalt their triumphs while whitewashing everything that led to their sacrifice. A superb writer and thinker like Mr. Hynes reminds us why we must resist that hollow pursuit, now more than ever.”

Wall Street Journal

“Hynes is fascinated with how the artist, in turn, shapes the ways we feel about and interpret war. . . .From renowned figures of literature to the less celebrated, the author offers powerful perspectives on the drama of destruction, exploring the character of wars ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ But the analysis is his own. He acknowledges, gloomily, that even the greatest art bears little power as a preventative instrument. Hynes studies what our literature and art tell us, or fail to tell us, about war, and there is much wisdom in his critique. He believes we have come to the end of ‘the Big Words and brave gestures and the tall stone monuments.’ A penetrating collection of pieces on war and how art responds to it.”

Kirkus Reviews

“The excellent Samuel Hynes has gathered some entertaining and provocative reflections, rooted in his long life and wide experience of both literature and war.”

New York Review of Books

“Hynes is a brilliant critic, both of the literature of war and its myths. In this, the writer he most resembles is Paul Fussell.

On War and Writing
On War and Writing

1,995.00

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