Bahoora presents a discussion of three Iraqi novels (Luay Hamza Abbas’s Closing His Eyes, Hassan Blasim’s The Reality and the Record, and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad) written during and after the Arab…
Kraemer argues the animation in Waltz With Bashir (2008) softens the real violence and atrocities committed by the characters in the film, allowing blame to be pushed off of Israeli soldiers and government officials.…
A 1970 commencement speech from Kurt Vonnegut, in which he argues that art restores innocence and optimism in its creators and its consumers alike. He advises students to “skylark,” or shirk duty, when they are young,…
Lynette Carpenter argues the 1949 film The Third Man serves as a warning to European political powers about the dangers of the Cold War mentality, which was setting in on political leaders at the time. Carpenter offers…
Peter C. Herman argues that Thomas More’s novel Utopia, Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, and Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle each present an ideal reality or utopia which have since drawn criticism from readers…
In this book chapter, Rick McCormick discusses Ernst Lubitch’s 1942 comedy To Be Or Not To Be, a film about a small theatre troupe living in Poland during the Nazi occupation. McCormick analyzes Lubitsch’s…
McCormick provides an analysis of the three most popular films of comedic director Ernst Lubitsch, and how each was infused with political agenda in the decade leading up to World War II. In an era where most comedies,…
Gallagher synthesizes the use of humor in narratives of war as well as those of peace, through the lens of famous anti-war novelist Kurt Vonnegut. She argues that Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five in particular uses…
Mohammed discusses the history of the Iraqi novel from the 1920s onward, including the large output in the 1960s, the character of highly censored novels produced between 1980 and 2003, many of which were war novels,…
Postcolonial scholar Sneharika Roy claims that in narratives of traumatized American expatriates, physical wounds serve as metaphors for psychological turmoil. She provides an interesting commentary on how post-war…