Cheryl Hindrichs, associate professor in the Department of English, published the essay, “‘I’m Not Sick.’ I Said, ‘I’m Wounded’: Disrupting Wounded Masculinity Through the Lyrical Spaces of War,” in the collection Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature. The collection debuted this spring and is edited by Kara Watts, Robin Hackett and Molly Hall.
The essay compares how Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” and John Dos Passos’s “Three Soldiers” portray male protagonists in war who resist disciplinary, gendered scopic regimes to the body (the military, the hospital). It examines how, for each protagonist, an interval of illness and injury enables them to envision the possibility of escape from these destructive regimes of masculinity into an alternative through the pastoral.
However, both Hemingway and Dos Passos depict this resistance as ultimately failing, and the physical wounding instead becomes an affective wound as both protagonists are re-inscribed in masculine hierarchies.