Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Antiwar Literature In The United States Since 1945, Kelly Roy Polasek

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines literary resistance to US militarism since 1945. I maintain that a requirement of antiwar literature is a disruption or break from the pro-war narrative that seeks to justify and normalize the wars and militarism that saturate this historical period; literary works about war that do not deviate from this narrative are simply war literature. In chapters on John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946), poetry and performance protests of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (1970-72), Rob Halpern’s Common Place (2015), and works of speculative fiction by Omar El Akkad (American War, 2017) and N.K. Jemisin (The Fifth Season, 2015), …