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Enajite E. Ojaruega discusses in her “Beyond Victimhood: Female Agency in Nigerian Civil War Novels” the agential roles women played during the Nigeria-Biafra war as reflected in selected fictional narratives. Female characters are generally impacted negatively by their individual and collective war-time experiences. However, there is another important aspect of women's war-time experiences that has largely been underplayed in most historical or literary accounts on war. Female agency recognizes this gender’s participatory roles during the conflict as they reconstruct their subjectivity in more beneficial ways in the unfolding circumstances of war. Women are depicted as being able to explore their womanhood and other available resources within diverse social, political and economic spheres to make a difference during the extremely traumatic period.

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.

Ausgehend von W.G. Sebalds berühmten Thesen zu Luftkrieg und Literatur beschäftigt sich der Artikel mit Gert Ledigs Vergeltung, einem Roman, der im Zuge der Debatte um Sebalds Thesen wiederentdeckt und mit großem Erfolg im Jahr 1999 erneut aufgelegt wurde, während er 1956 bei seiner Erstpublikation negativ bewertet wurde und bald in Vergessenheit geriet. Der Roman Ledigs wird untersucht in Beziehung auf die von Sebald formulierten Thesen zu Luftkrieg und Literatur und auf seinen Wert als Dokument der Beschreibung eines Luftangriffes auf eine deutsche Stadt. Dieser Wert wird besonders von W.G. Sebald selbst in Frage gestellt, da dieser Zweifel hegt an der Möglichkeit der direkten Darstellung von Kriegsgräueln über die Sprache, wie sie in Ledigs Roman erscheint., Following German writer W.G. Sebald’s famous debate on aerial warfare and literature during World War II, as represented in his work On the Natural History of Destruction, the article aims to study Gert Ledig’s Payback, a novel rediscovered after Sebald’s debate and successfully republished in 1999, while negatively reviewed on its first publication in 1956. Ledig’s novel will be analyzed in relation to the themes of Sebald’s debate on aerial warfare and literature and in relation to its value as a document of the description of an aerial attack on a German town. This value is particularly questioned by Sebald who doubts the possibility of a direct representation of wartime atrocities through language, as in Ledig’s novel.

Śląski niemieckojęzyczny autor – Arnold Zweig – zajmował się do końca swojego życia traumatycznym okresem I wojny światowej i napisał wiele dzieł poświęconych tej tematyce. Artykuł ten w pierwszej kolejności prezentuje zainteresowanie osobą Arnolda Zweiga w Polskiej Republice Ludowej oraz opisuje recepcję tłumaczeń jego powieści autorstwa nieżyjącej już tłumaczki Wandy Kragen. W drugiej części niniejszej publikacji autorka skupia się na scharakteryzowaniu powieści „Junge Frau von 1914“ (Młoda kobieta z roku 1914)., A Silesian German speaking author – Arnold Zweig – had been working on a traumatic period of the First World War until he died and he wrote a lot of books devoted to this subject. In the first place this article presents an interest in the person of Arnold Zweig in the Polish People’s Republic, then describes the reception of the translations of the deceased Polish translator Wanda Kragen. Whereas the second part concentrates on the characteristics of the novel entitled „Junge Frau von 1914“ (The young woman from 1914).

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.

L’écrivain Stratis Myrivilis traduit son expérience de la guerre en Macédoine, son désarroi en découvrant l’identité culturelle « macédoniens orthodoxes ».Cet article examine la relation de Stratis Myrivilis, écrivain grec né à Lesbos en 1890 et mort à Athènes en 1967, avec la Macédoine, qu’il a connue en tant que soldat pendant les Guerres balkaniques de 1912-1913 puis lors de la Première Guerre mondiale de 1917 à 1919, au travers de son roman La vie dans le tombeau publié de 1923 à 1924 et plusieurs fois réédité. L’article souligne le désarroi du narrateur qui s’exprime dans le chapitre « La Cité Fantôme », alors qu’il participe, en 1917, à la jonction des Grecs avec le front français, face à la complexité de la situation de la Macédoine où les frontières sont en permanente construction, où les guerres se succèdent et où les alliances se font et se défont au détriment des populations. D’une part il montre comment Myrivilis, dans les chapitres « La maison de la bonté » et « Zavali Maïko – Pauvre Mère », commente les sentiments des membres de la famille où, blessé, il passe sa convalescence, comment il analyse l’identité culturelle de ces gens qui ne se veulent ni Bulgares, ni Serbes, ni Grecs, mais seulement Macédoniens orthodoxes et enfin comment les habitants sont pris au piège de la rivalité gréco–bulgare entre le patriarcat Œcuménique et l’Église indépendantiste bulgare, l’Exarchat. D’autre part, il présente la position de l’écrivain qui semble prendre des distances quand le terme « Macédoine » est utilisé, par les voisins du nord, pour exprimer une entité politique et non géographique. En conclusion, l’article souligne l’humanisme de Myrivilis qui décrit les catastrophes de la guerre et la vanité humaine et prône la nécessité de surmonter les différences et de vivre ensemble en paix.This article examines the relationship of Stratos myrivilis, -a Greek writer, who was born on Lesbos in 1890 and died in Athens in 1967- with Macedonia, which he knew as a soldier during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, and then during the First World War from 1917-1919. It is based on myrivilis’s novel Life in the Tomb, which was published in 1923-1924 and reprinted several times. The article underscores the narrator’s distress as expressed in the chapter “The Ghost Town”, when he participated, in 1919,in the clash between the Greeks and the French, in the face of the complexity of the situation in Macedonia when the borders are constantly in flux, where one war follows another, and where the alliances are made and unmade at the population’s expense. On the one hand it shows how Myrivilis, in the chapters “In the House of Kindnes” and “Zavali Maïko—Poor Mother” comments on the feelings of the members of the family where, wounded, he spends his convalescence, how he analyses the cultural identity of these people who regard themselves as neither Bulgarians, Serbs, nor Greeks but simply Macedonian Orthodox, and finally how the inhabitants fall into the trap of the Greco-Bulgarian rivalry between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the independent Bulgarian Church, the Exarchate. On the other hand, it presents the stance of the writer, who seems to distance himself from the northern neighbours when they use the term “Macedonia” to describe a political entity rather than a geographical one. In conclusion, the article underlines the humanism of Myrivilis, who described the catastrophies of war and human vanity and advocated the need to surmount their differences and live together in peace.