Writer, Scholar of American Literature and Culture, Army Veteran
Coming this fall with the New American Canon series in Contemporary American Literature and Culture
at the University of Iowa Press:
at the University of Iowa Press:
WRITING WARS
Authorship and American War Fiction, WWI to Present
|
Who writes novels about war? For nearly a century after World War I, the answer was simple: soldiers who had been there. The assumption that a person must have experienced war in the flesh in order to write about it in fiction was taken for granted by writers, reviewers, critics, and even scholars.
Contemporary American fiction tells a different story. Less than half of the authors of contemporary war novels are veterans. And that’s hardly the only change. Today’s war novelists focus on the psychological and moral challenges of soldiers coming home rather than the physical danger of combat overseas. They also imagine the consequences of the wars from non-American perspectives in a way that defies the genre’s conventions. To understand why these changes have occurred, David Eisler argues that we must go back nearly fifty years, to the political decision to abolish the draft. The ramifications rippled into the field of cultural production, transforming the foundational characteristics— authorship, content, and form—of the American war fiction genre. |
“A very smart, very relevant work. Any scholar of American war fiction would find this study extremely useful.”
—Eric Bennett, author, A Big Enough Lie “Writing Wars is a brilliant excavation of the stories Americans have been telling ourselves about war for the past century. Eisler has written a sharp, engaging, and troubling cultural history.” —Phil Klay, National Book Award winner, author, Redeployment 
|
Recent Highlights
“[T]o tell the truth against dominant mythologies is always offensive” --
An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Amerikastudien/American Studies 67, No. 1 (2022)
|
|
"Collision Course: Don't Look Up and the Politicization of Science in America"
An essay for the Heidelberg Center of American Studies Graduate Blog, January 2022
|
|
"Different Kinds of Infinity"
|
Check out my short story, "Different Kinds of Infinity," in the anthology of short fiction, The Road Ahead: Fiction from the Forever War, published by Pegasus Books in January 2017.
|
