The influence of the navy on literature is not necessarily a traditional topic in Western canon. The issue of maritime concerns can be traced as far back as Homer's Odyssey with a military leader taking the role of the protagonist. It is not just through content that naval concerns have influenced Western literature, but through the experiences of authors in serving their nations. Soldiers and veterans have long turned to literature during and following service, for a variety of reasons. It is in the twentieth century that American sailors began to seriously influence the genres in which they wrote. Science Fiction's golden age can be attributed, in part, to Robert Heinlein, and Frank Herbert, two men who served in the Navy during World War Two. Likewise, the postmodern genre was expanded by Richard Marcinko and Thomas Pynchon, who served in the years following the war. The experiences of these authors in the United States Navy provided background with which they shaped their respective genres. Together, their works share the common theme of society over the individual.
Science fiction and the sea are surprisingly linked in their history. Early attributes can be noted as early as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which experimented with fantastic elements, made realistic by adhering to real world rules and practices1. Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea likewise used true historical detail “to convey a sense of existence... through three layers of operability: existing technology, those plausible through their analogy with the existing, and the fictive,”2. The experiences of both Heinlein and Herbert in WWII provided them with experience and knowledge to draw on to create realistic predictions in their works, which wer...
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...pen Court Publishing, 2011.
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Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed is a memoir of a junior soldier during the island hopping campaign in the Pacific theater during the Second World War. Written over thirty-five years after VJ-Day, his narrative carries the weight of emotion while brilliantly depicting the struggle of the individual soldier at the tactical level. As Sledge recounts his experience, he writes like a patriarch attempting to preserve his legacy through the account of his physically arduous and morally dubious ordeal. Already an established classic, Sledge’s memoir has resurged since becoming one of the narrative mainstays for the television mini-series The Pacific.
In 2010 author Andre Dubus III had an excerpt published called “My Father Was a Writer”. The author writes about how his father who was a Marine and how life was as a military family. Eventually the stresses of being a Marine took its toll on the relationship between his father and the family. In 1963, the author’s grandfather passed away and not long after his father retired from The Marines and traveled down a new path and was accepted into Iowa Writers’ Workshop. As time went by the father’s life began to change. From hugging and kissing his wife to letting his appearance change from clean cut and shaved to growing his hair and having a mustache. Showing the author and his siblings more attention from sitting with them at night just to tell
Literature and film have always held a strange relationship with the idea of technological progress. On one hand, with the advent of the printing press and the refinements of motion picture technology that are continuing to this day, both literature and film owe a great deal of their success to the technological advancements that bring them to widespread audiences. Yet certain films and works of literature have also never shied away from portraying the dangers that a lust for such progress can bring with it. The modern output of science-fiction novels and films found its genesis in speculative ponderings on the effect such progress could hold for the every day population, and just as often as not those speculations were damning. Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein and Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis are two such works that hold great importance in the overall canon of science-fiction in that they are both seen as the first of their kind. It is often said that Mary Shelley, with her authorship of Frankenstein, gave birth to the science-fiction novel, breathing it into life as Frankenstein does his monster, and Lang's Metropolis is certainly a candidate for the first genuine science-fiction film (though a case can be made for Georges Méliès' 1902 film Le Voyage Dans la Lune, his film was barely fifteen minutes long whereas Lang's film, with its near three-hour original length and its blending of both ideas and stunning visuals, is much closer to what we now consider a modern science-fiction film). Yet though both works are separated by the medium with which they're presented, not to mention a period of over two-hundred years between their respective releases, they present a shared warning about the dangers that man's need fo...
Some of the most intriguing stories of today are about people’s adventures at sea and the thrill and treachery of living through its perilous storms and disasters. Two very popular selections about the sea and its terrors are The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger and “The Wreck of the Hesperus” by Henry Longfellow. Comparison between the two works determines that “The Wreck of the Hesperus” tells a more powerful sea-disaster story for several different reasons. The poem is more descriptive and suspenseful than The Perfect Storm, and it also plays on a very powerful tool to captivate the reader’s emotion. These key aspects combine to give the reader something tangible that allows them to relate to the story being told and affects them strongly.
Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor is a critically acclaimed novella set around the shores of England in the last decade of the Eighteenth Century. The plot revolved around a young Sailor, Billy Budd, who was extracted from the ship he was originally on, The Rights of Man, and was oppressed to a British naval warship named the H.M.S. Billopotent. There were numerous allusions used throughout the novella that enhanced the meaning of this great work. The allusions used pertain towards myths, the Bible, History, and other works of literature. All of them together illuminate the true meaning of the entire novella.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea: True Order Exists in the Exposed Core
Science fiction never ceases to amaze me as I take great enjoyment in exploring these creative universes. I have always had a great interest in military science fiction for its take on technological innovation and critical analysis. Military science fiction in general is very speculative about future of technology and warfare. The military science fiction genre also serves as a critique of contemporary politics as it deals with many of the same issues that go on today. This has made military science fiction one if the most well respected genres of science fiction for it ability to indirectly criticize modern society. My Integrated Project explores the relationship between how technology that has arisen from war has been some of the most innovative and why war has become an unshakeable aspect of human existence.
“Books are the carriers of civilization” (ThinkExist, 2010, para. 1). The first part of a quote from Barbara W. Tuchman cannot be truer. It is why students study America’s classic novels to learn about the time period. Many authors intend writing for the future, while others just write for fun. They use literary techniques that are popular to the time period, making it obvious when the pieces were written. With the history, you also get the sentiment of the writer that only the novel can give you. The result of this is a great fusion between literature and history, and has its roots since the beginning of America.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Some time ago, I decided to read Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, by Jules Verne. I figured that because it was so well known it must be an extremely interesting book. In addition, it was science fiction, the one area that I was always interested. My assumption was only partially correct, for I only was to a degree interested in the piece of writing. When Jules Verne was writing this book, he must have been reading some incredibly dull science book the day before, for that was what the book was written as. The style of writing was utterly against my tastes, and though the plot was moderately interesting, the style of writing really ruined it. Often, the author will trail off describing some marine animal for pages at a time. Two entire chapters were almost entirely this! However, the setting and characters of the story seemed to be well thought out. Nevertheless, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea was an extremely tedious volume. When the story was introduced, Jules Verne described M. Aronnax, the main character, whose love for marine biology was more important than anything else to him did. This immediately led to the international crisis about a bizarre aquatic creature, which immediately dragged M. Aronnax into the action. Due to his expertise on the matter, the public expected Pierre to be the one to solve this mystery. M. Aronnax, under all this pressure, concluded that the animal was to be called the Narwhale. At first, the mat...
In the beginning of the twentieth century, literature changed and focused on breaking away from the typical and predicate patterns of normal literature. Poets at this time took full advantage and stretched the idea of the mind’s conscience on how the world, mind, and language interact and contradict. Many authors, such as Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Twain, used the pain and anguish in first hand experiences to create and depict a new type of literature, modernism. In this time era, literature and art became a larger part of society and impacted more American lives than ever before. During the American modernism period of literature, authors, artists, and poets strived to create pieces of literature and art that challenged American traditions and tried to reinvent it, used new ways of communication, such as the telephone and cinema, to demonstrate the new modern social norms, and express the pain and suffering of the First World War.
Abe Kobo was involved in a critical discussion on science fiction when it started to be popular in the early 1960s. In this article, Abe argues that “pseudo-science is a huge pillar that supports science fiction world” (28). He details that the characteristics of pseudo-science in SF allow its readers to find their wonder on its description rather than to doubt whether it is true or not, which is a way of literature. In such a way, pseudo-science could become a creative feature as hypothesis helping to make the story intriguing. It was interesting to see how Abe details the aesthetics of pseudo-science in relation to everydayness: he emphasizes that scientific hypothesis in the literature could make everyday unstable and shows it strange.
The lost generation was a group of writers who gained much popularity and grew in their literary expansion post WWI from 1918 through 1930. (Lost Generation) Prior to enlisting in the war, Americans were promised an upbringing of patriotism and honor for serving one’s country. They found returning home that the honor in which they believed to be fighting for was nothing more than witnessing innocent men killed. Upon returning back from WWI the image of patriotism and honor faded when the realism of the after effects of the war and the consequence became apparent in our young men. World War I destroyed the virtuous envision young American men had towards their country when they returned home after witnessing friends dying in battle and many returning home in a state that left them both physically and emotionally impaired. (The Lost Generation: American Writers of the 1920's)
Of the many authors writing naval history, there are some that take their talents to create worlds of there own that can, at times, parallel our own. The writers of historical fiction can create some incredibly entertaining works. For the purposes of this paper three authors will be focused on. These three are Patrick O’Brian, C.S. Forester and Dudley Pope. These authors are some of the most renown for their many publications. Each of them has created at least one series of novels on the premise of historical naval fiction. Patrick O’Brian created the series of novels of Captain Jack Aubrey and his companion Dr. Stephen Maturin (known as the Aubrey-Maturin series). C.S. Forester is the creator of the Captain Horatio Hornblower series. Finally, Dudley Pope is the creator of the Ramage series that follows the life of Lord Nicholas Ramage. What all these authors have in common is that all their characters are apart of the British Royal Navy during the late 19th century either during the French Revolutionary War or the Napoleonic War.
The post World War II period had an enormous impact on American society and literature. Many important events occurred and affected directly to the movement of American literature. During this period, American Literature reflected the movement of disillusionment, and portrayed the lost generation. Many WWII writers adapted new approaches and philosophies in writing their novels. They portrayed the lost generation, anti-war perspective and explored the true meaning of “war hero”. Among them, the pioneers are Bernard Malamud, Ken Kesey and Joseph Heller, who wrote the Natural, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Catch-22.
After world war II the world got smaller, faster, fewer mysteries of science, geography and paradoxically less time to enjoy it. It was told that literature was better the period pre-war; however, the literature in old days was not in hand of lot of people as it is for these days. After all, every era has it own taste of literature.