Wars have always been connected to images. From the representation of war on maps, panoramas, and paintings to the modern visual media of photography, film, and digital screens, images have played a central role in representing combat, military strategy, soldiers, and victims. Such images evoke a whole range of often unexpected emotions from ironic distance to boredom and disappointment. Why is that? This book examines the emotional language of war images, how they entwine with various visual technologies, and how they can build emotional communities. The book engages in a cross-disciplinary dialogue between visual studies, literary studies, and media studies by discussing the links between images, emotions, technology, and community. From these different perspectives, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the nature and workings of war images from 1800 until today, and it offers a frame for thinking about the meaning of the images in contemporary wars.
Table of Contents:
Preface (W.J.T Mitchell)
Introduction (Anders Engberg-Pedersen and Kathrin Maurer)
Part I: Equivocal Emotions
1. Cropped Vision: Photography and Complicity in Women’s World War II Memoirs (Elisabeth Krimmer)
2. Horsemeat with Cucumber Salad: Laughing at the Images of War in Alexander Kluge’s Films (Andrea Schütte)
3. Max Beckmann’s Revenants and Ernst Jünger’s Drones: Vision and Coolness in the Interwar Period (Christine Kanz)
Part II: Emotional Technologies
4. Flat Emotions: Maps and Wargames as Emotional Technologies (Anders Engberg-Pedersen)
5. The Paradox of Total Immersion: Watching War in Nineteenth-Century Panoramas (Kathrin Maurer)
6. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Drone Operators: Relying on Uncertainty in Omer Fast’s 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011) (Svea Braeunert)
7. Towards a Poor Cinema: The Performativity of Mobile Cameras in New Image Wars (Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans)
Part III: Building Emotional Communities
8. Visualizing Community: A Look at World War II Propaganda Films (Hermann Kappelhoff)
9. From Warrior Heroes to Vulnerable Boys: Debunking "Soldierly Masculinity" in Tim Hetherington’s Infidel Photos (Thomas Ærvold Bjerre)
10. Visualizing War in the Museum: Experiential Spaces, Emotions, and Memory Politics (Stephan Jaeger)
11. War in the Age of Anti-Social Media (Jan Mieszkowski)
About the Author :
Anders Engberg-Pedersen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark. He holds a PhD from Harvard University in Comparative Literature and from Humboldt Universität in German Literature. He is the author of Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things and editor of Literature and Cartography: Theories, Histories, Genres.
Kathrin Maurer is Associate Professor of German Literature at the University of Southern Denmark. She holds a PhD from Columbia University in German Literature and has also worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Visualizing the Past: The Power of the Image in German Historicism.
