War Without Bodies : Framing Death from the Crimean to the Iraq War / Martin Danahay.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Danahay, Martin A., author.

Series:

War culture.

War Culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

War--casualties in mass media.

War.

Mass media and war.

War--Moral and ethical aspects.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (155 pages)

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, [2022]

Summary:

"Historically the bodies of civilians are the most damaged by the increasing mechanization and derealization of warfare, but this is not reflected in the representation of violence in popular media. In War Without Bodies, author Martin Danahay argues that the media in the United States in particular constructs a "war without bodies" in which neither the corpses of soldiers or civilians are shown. War Without Bodies traces the intertwining of new communications technologies and war from the Crimean War, when Roger Fenton took the first photographs of the British army and William Howard Russell used the telegraph to transmit his dispatches, to the first of three "video wars" in the Gulf region in 1990-91, within the context of a war culture that made the costs of organized violence acceptable to a wider public. New modes of communication have paradoxically not made more war "real" but made it more ubiquitous and at the same time unremarkable as bodies are erased from coverage. Media such as photography and instantaneous video initially seemed to promise more realism but were assimilated into existing conventions that implicitly justified war. These new representations of war were framed in a way that erased the human cost of violence and replaced it with images that defused opposition to warfare. Analyzing poetry, photographs, video and video games the book illustrates the ways in which war was framed in these different historical contexts. It examines the cultural assumptions that influenced the reception of images of war and discusses how death and damage to bodies was made acceptable to the public. War Without Bodies aims to heighten awareness of how acceptance of war is coded into texts and how active resistance to such hidden messages can help prevent future unnecessary wars"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: Two photographs

Sacrificial bodies : Fenton, Tennyson and the Charge of the Light Brigade

The soldier's body and sites of mourning

War games

Trauma and the soldier's body

Sophie Ristelhueber : landscape as body

Conclusion: Future war without bodies.

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Danahay, Martin War Without Bodies

ISBN:

1-9788-1923-4

OCLC:

1291279164