American War Adventure and the Generic Pleasures of Military Violence: Clint Eastwood's American Sniper

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik
Copyright Year	2018
Abstract	“ADVENTURE” IS A WORD USED IN THE NONACADEMIC WORLD for something fun or unusual, as well as being a scholarly term for an archetypal story (Frye; Cawelti), a modern narrative of colonial violence or capitalist enterprise (Green, Dreams), and a genre of nineteenth-century British fiction (Kestner). Adventure should also be understood as a narrative mode that organizes stories and representations in contemporary popular culture, structuring meaning and affect in narratives featuring violence in a way similar to how melodrama organizes meaning and affect in narratives featuring suffering (Williams; Elsaesser; Brooks). According to Linda Williams, melodrama comprises a family of narrative features meant to create sympathetic identification with a virtuous victim (29). The pleasures of melodrama involve a complex play of intradiegetic misrecognitions and discoveries of the moral identity of key characters but especially the victimized hero or heroine. Adventure functions in an analogous way, but the main pleasures derive from identification with a hero successfully confronting danger and violence. The “basic moral fantasy implicit in this type of story,” John G. Cawelti asserts, is “victory over death” (40). Ideologically, adventure can assume a range of political configurations, including progressive ones, as there is no inherent political coloring to stories about overcoming great challenges. Historically, however, adventure writing—both fictional and nonfictional—has been closely aligned with the colonial and imperial projects of modern nation states, casting
Starting Page	1376
Ending Page	1397
Page Count	22
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
DOI	10.1111/jpcu.12735
Volume Number	51
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://people.unil.ch/agnieszkasoltysikmonnet/files/2018/12/Monnet-2018-The_Journal_of_Popular_Culture.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article