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US society has controversially debated civil-military relationships and war trauma since the Vietnam War. Civic activists today promote Indigenous warrior traditions as role models for non-Native veteran reintegration and health care. They particularly stress the role of ritual and narrative for civil-military negotiations of war experience and for trauma therapy. Applying a cultural-comparative lens, this book reads non-Native soldiers' and veterans' life writing from post-9/11 wars as «ceremonial storytelling.» It analyzes activist academic texts, «milblogs» written in the war zone, as well as «homecoming scenarios.» Soldiers' and veterans' interactions with civilians constitute jointly constructed, narrative civic rituals that discuss the meaning of war experience and homecoming.

"Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Germans exhibited a widespread cultural passion for tales and representations of Native Americans. This book explores the evolution of German national identity and its relationship with the ideas and cultural practices around 'Indianthusiasm.' Pervasive and adaptable, imagery of Native Americans was appropriated by Nazi propaganda and merged with exceptionalist notions of German tribalism, oxymoronically promoting the Nazis' racial ideology. This book combines cultural and intellectual history to scrutinize the motifs of Native American imagery in German literature, media, and scholarship, and analyzes how these motifs facilitated the propaganda effort to nurture national pride, racial thought, militarism, and hatred against the Allied powers among the German populace"--Provided by publisher

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG-geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich. ; The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq initiated a surge of texts by US soldiers who utilized recent Web 2.0 technology to forge new types of war narratives, such as the so-called "milblogs." Milblogs merge letter and journal writing with journalistic reporting, and they maintain contact between soldiers and their social environment. They are at once public and private communication. Military psychology since Vietnam has referred to warrior traditions of Native American communities to discuss public narration and ceremonial acknowledgment of a soldier's war experience as vital elements for veteran readjustment and trauma recovery. This article analyzes an exemplary milblog to argue that the interaction between blogger and audience does similar cultural work and has comparable ceremonial and, therefore, therapeutic functions: Soldiers publicly share their experience, reflect on it with their audience, receive appreciation and support, and thus mutually (re-)negotiate group identity

The following contribution interweaves culturalanthropological and media studies approaches to analyze the concept of 'community' in a phenomenon of the new media, the socalled 'milblogs.' These communities use the blogosphere to create and distribute a master arrative about the relationship of American civil society with its military and, thus, about how segments of American society attempt to come to terms with the War on Terror. The contribution emphasizes the interaction of bloggers with their audience in the narrative process of imagining, proclaiming, and nurturing such communities.

This contribution explores notions of "popular narratology" in reports, memos and strategic research papers of the US military and affiliated institutions. It investigates the military´s analysis of emerging social media practices and corresponding efforts to adapt military organization, strategy, and culture to these new technological and cultural phenomena. Employing notions and techniques of constructing and disseminating a narrative that they borrow from literary theory, media studies, and advertising, these texts negotiate best practices to set political agendas and instigate institutional reforms within the military. Providing a cultural history perspective on these recent developments in military policy, this article emphasizes the military papers´reflections on the textuality of military information in order to reveal their agenda of furthering the military´s interests. It is thus invested in exploring how textual (i.e., "poetic") qualities serve as tools to pursue political goals.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq initiated a surge of texts by US soldiers who utilized recent Web 2.0 technology to forge new types of war narratives, such as the so-called "milblogs." Milblogs merge letter and journal writing with journalistic reporting, and they maintain contact between soldiers and their social environment. They are at once public and private communication. Military psychology since Vietnam has referred to warrior traditions of Native American communities to discuss public narration and ceremonial acknowledgment of a soldier's war experience as vital elements for veteran readjustment and trauma recovery. This article analyzes an exemplary milblog to argue that the interaction between blogger and audience does similar cultural work and has comparable ceremonial and, therefore, therapeutic functions: Soldiers publicly share their experience, reflect on it with their audience, receive appreciation and support, and thus mutually (re-)negotiate group identity.

This is a book about contemporary American(ized) narratives and the audiences they call into being. It brings together eight very diverse case studies covering and investigating a wide range of media, genres, and modes to ask how contemporary 'texts' encourage 'imagined communities' of readers/viewers that operate as 'public spheres' of social and political deliberation, self-fashioning, and debate. In asking this question, the contributions collected in this volume shift perspectives in a number of ways: They question the boundary between the audiences of (often popular and broadly circulating) narratives on the one side and national public spheres on the other; they thus encourage rereading the transnational mobility of American(ized) narratives not simply as a phenomenon of popular culture but as an indicator of emerging transnational public spheres; and they invite us to look closely at the narrative dynamics with which these texts operate their audiences as public spheres.