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Although currently still engaged in the longest war in U.S. history, the military is comprised of only 1% of the U.S. population. In the absence of conscription, most Americans are isolated from the experience of combat and limited in their affective connections to war. Despite these limited geographic, psychological, cultural, aesthetic, and affective connections, the costs of war are coming home. Since 2001, more than 7,000 U.S. troops have died; 50,000 were visibly wounded; and more than 500,000 suffer from invisible injuries such as PTSD. These human losses only begin to index the effects of the wars on returning servicemembers, their families, and the larger civilian population, as rising rates of military suicide, domestic violence, sexual assault, alcohol and substance abuse, and homicide point to a larger crisis in which the homefront and battlefront are increasingly merged. In this dissertation, I analyze how contemporary war novels, cinema, and post-cinematic media try to bridge the "military-civilian divide" through the affective conditions of war. My central claim is that the traces of war can be found not only in the content but also in the form of texts such as Toni Morrison's Home (2012), Ha Jin's Nanjing Requiem (2011), and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. I argue that these hybrid forms, which transgress boundaries of fact and fiction, generate war's multiple affects within the fictional textual world and in the real audiences who read or watch them. These texts help to bridge combat experience and civilian ignorance by appealing to affective states both in the characters and the audience. To better understand the effects of modern war's changing spaces, times, tactics, strategy, and weapons, I analyze texts that represent both the battlefront and the homefront. By bringing together different scales of representation and affective resonance, we can see the war stories that are often neglected and better understand how to engage with and heal a new generation of war wounded.

The concept of immunity as developed by Roberto Esposito is complementary with the category of community and contrasts the notion of security with that of external contamination. In this article, the logic of immunity is applied to two 2012 Italian war novels set in Afghanistan, namely Melania Mazzucco's "Limbo" and Paolo Giordano's "The Human Body". In these novels, the space of the Forward Operating Base's so-called "security bubble" represents both the protective and the thanatopolitical sides of immunity, an ambivalent notion that offers the narrative framework to study Esposito's affirmative biopolitics. Both novels are part of the post-9/11 "return to the real," in that reconstruction and affect prevail over deconstruction and relativism. They thematize the mediatized experience of humanitarian and globalized warfare and raise questions about layered memories of war and national identity. Therefore, these narrations can be analyzed as examples of Vermeulen's "narratives of affect", De Boever's "narratives of care", and Breu's "late-capitalist literature of materiality", studies that question the relationship between literature and biopolitics.

This essay takes its cue from Butler's notion of precariousness, delineated in her study Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004). But while Butler is concerned with the events of 9/11 as the US-American seminal catastrophe of the early twenty-first century, this essay focuses on fictional representations of WWI and WWII, the two wars which turned out to determine European and, indeed, World politics throughout the twentieth century. The novels discussed in this essay are examples of how fictional texts of both the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries are involved in critically (re)evaluating the British perspective on these two wars which can be described, each for its own particular cultural, political and ideological reasons, as having exposed the precariousness of human existence. Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy (1991-1995) is engaged in demythologizing WWI as a 'great' war. A.L. Kennedy’s Day (2007) is concerned with undermining the notion of WWII as a 'just' war the British fought in defence of civilization and humanity. Each novel problematizes the damaging effects which the inhumane conditions of industrial warfare have on human psychic stability. Both Barker's trilogy and Kennedy's novel feature protagonists whose traumatic war experiences have caused them to develop split personalities; and it is with the help of these characters' mental instabilities that the texts negotiate the precarious consequences entailed in a self's complete loss of control and power over one's own well-being. Next to discussing each author's particular representational strategy of narrating her protagonist's split into self and internal other, the essay also analyses the different ideological agendas underlying Barker's and Kennedy's texts. As the essay shows, both writers' protagonists strive to reconcile self and internal other in order to reaffirm their identities. But while Kennedy's Day is indebted to liberal humanism in its celebration of 'high' art and its supposed unifying effects on human Selfhood, Barker's novels suggest a reconciliation of traumatized self and internal other which is best analysed through the lens of Levinasian ethics. The Regeneration trilogy, the essay argues, privileges a concept of dual, if not multiple selfhood by representing healing as the ethical acceptance of difference, not its repression or expulsion. Thus, Barker's novels defy the violence which, according to Levinas, comes from subjecting the other to the self's understanding.