Stacey Peebles – författare

Our collective memories of World War II and Vietnam have been shaped as much by memoirs, novels, and films as they have been by history books. In Welcome to the Suck, Stacey Peebles examines the growing body of contemporary war stories in prose, poetry, and film that speak to the American soldier's experience in the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War. Stories about war always encompass ideas about initiation, masculinity, cross-cultural encounters, and trauma. Peebles shows us how these timeless themes find new expression among a generation of soldiers who have grown up in a time when it has been more acceptable than ever before to challenge cultural and societal norms, and who now have unprecedented and immediate access to the world away from the battlefield through new media and technology.Two Gulf War memoirs by Anthony Swofford (Jarhead) and Joel Turnipseed (Baghdad Express) provide a portrait of soldiers living and fighting on the cusp of the major political and technological changes that would begin in earnest just a few years later. The Iraq War, a much longer conflict, has given rise to more and various representations. Peebles covers a blog by Colby Buzzell ("My War"), memoirs by Nathaniel Fick (One Bullet Away) and Kayla Williams (Love My Rifle More Than You); a collection of stories by John Crawford (The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell); poetry by Brian Turner (Here, Bullet); the documentary Alive Day Memories; and the feature films In the Valley of Elah and the winner of the 2010 Oscar for Best Picture, The Hurt Locker, both written by the war correspondent Mark Boal. Books and other media emerging from the conflicts in the Gulf have yet to receive the kind of serious attention that Vietnam War texts received during the 1980s and 1990s. With its thoughtful and timely analysis, Welcome to the Suck will provoke much discussion among those who wish to understand today's war literature and films and their place in the tradition of war representation more generally.

Cormac McCarthy is renowned as the author of popular and acclaimed novels such as Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, and The Road. Throughout his career, however, McCarthy has also invested deeply in writing for film and theater, an engagement with other forms of storytelling that is often overlooked. He is the author of five screenplays and two plays, and he has been significantly involved with three of the seven film adaptations of his work. In this book, Stacey Peebles offers the first extensive overview of this relatively unknown aspect of McCarthy’s writing life, including the ways in which other artists have interpreted his work for the stage and screen.Drawing on many primary sources in McCarthy’s recently opened archive, as well as interviews, Peebles covers the 1977 televised film The Gardener’s Son; McCarthy’s unpublished screenplays from the 1980s that became the foundation for his Border Trilogy novels and No Country for Old Men; various successful and unsuccessful productions of his two plays; and all seven film adaptations of his work, including John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009) and the Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men (2007). Emerging from this narrative is the central importance of tragedy-the rich and varied portrayals of violence and suffering and the human responses to them-in all of McCarthy’s work, but especially his writing for theater and film.

Cormac McCarthy is renowned as the author of popular and acclaimed novels such as Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, and The Road. Throughout his career, however, McCarthy has also invested deeply in writing for film and theater, an engagement with other forms of storytelling that is often overlooked. He is the author of five screenplays and two plays, and he has been significantly involved with three of the seven film adaptations of his work. In this book, Stacey Peebles offers the first extensive overview of this relatively unknown aspect of McCarthy’s writing life, including the ways in which other artists have interpreted his work for the stage and screen.Drawing on many primary sources in McCarthy’s recently opened archive, as well as interviews, Peebles covers the 1977 televised film The Gardener’s Son; McCarthy’s unpublished screenplays from the 1980s that became the foundation for his Border Trilogy novels and No Country for Old Men; various successful and unsuccessful productions of his two plays; and all seven film adaptations of his work, including John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009) and the Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men (2007). Emerging from this narrative is the central importance of tragedy-the rich and varied portrayals of violence and suffering and the human responses to them-in all of McCarthy’s work, but especially his writing for theater and film.

In the decades since his 1992 breakout novel, All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy has gained a reputation as one of the greatest contemporary American authors. Experimenting with genres such as the crime thriller, the post-apocalyptic novel, and the western, his work also engages with the aesthetics of cinema, and several of his novels have been adapted for the screen. While timely and relevant, his works' idiosyncratic language and intense, troubling portrayals of racism, sexism, and violence can pose challenges for students.This volume offers strategies for guiding students through McCarthy's oeuvre, addressing all his novels as well as his published plays and screenplays. Part 1, "Materials," provides sources of biographical information and key scholarship on McCarthy. Essays in part 2, "Approaches," discuss subjects such as landscape and ecology, mythologies of the American West, film adaptations, and literary contexts, and describe assignments that encourage students to write creatively and to examine their personal values.

A cosmopolitan author who spent nearly a decade in Europe and was versed in the works of his British and French contemporaries, James Fenimore Cooper was also deeply concerned with the America of his day and its history. His works embrace themes that have dominated American literature since: the frontier; the oppression of Native Americans by Europeans; questions of race, gender, and class; and rugged individualism, as represented by figures like the pirate, the spy, the hunter, and the settler. His most memorable character, Natty Bumppo, has entered into American popular culture. The essays in this volume offer students bridges to Cooper's novels, which grapple with complex moral issues that are still crucial today. Engaging with film adaptations, cross-culturalism, animal studies, media history, environmentalism, and Indigenous American poetics, the essays offer new ways to bring these novels to life in the classroom.

Traces the scholarly conversation on McCarthy, an ever-changing and challenging author who asked big questions, from his obscure beginnings to the height of his fame and beyond.From the beginning of a career that encapsulated decades-long obscurity, best-selling fame, and a Pulitzer Prize, Cormac McCarthy engaged with big questions. Are people inherently violent? Inherently moral? How do we understand the divine? How do we understand each other-if at all? What is the nature of reality? What does it mean to be human? These are philosophical questions, but McCarthy didn't write philosophical treatises: he wrote novels, plays, and screenplays that engage with his many and varied interests. Scholarship on McCarthy has addressed those questions and interests, and taken as a whole, it shows how his work takes us from deep dives into the details of historical context, regional identity, and literary allusion to ways of understanding the world more broadly.Until McCarthy's death in 2023, scholars continually adapted to an author who experimented with differing forms, genres, and settings, all in an effort to capture big-picture truths. This study traces the critical engagement with McCarthy's work through his changes in genre, style, and interests. It is the story of an ongoing scholarly conversation that follows McCarthy's big questions and posits what some of the answers might be.

How do we tell twenty-first-century war stories when the wars seem to go on forever? In the post-2011 surge of war stories published in America and Iraq, the defining characteristic is the depiction of combat violence that crosses borders, overtakes civilian spaces, and disrupts chronology. In The War Comes with You: Enduring War in Life, Fiction, and Fantasy, Stacey Peebles picks up where her groundbreaking first book, Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq, left off. Via careful readings of fiction, memoir, and poetry by writers including Ben Fountain, Siobhan Fallon, Brian Turner, and Hassan Blasim, as well as recent superhero and Star Wars films, Peebles argues that in the face of real and fantasy "forever wars," things fall apart. Language, identities, bodies, and even the stories themselves fragment. These narratives suggest, however, that people need not accept incoherence and there is a range of meaningful responses to the experience of everywhere all-the-time war. Peebles illustrates what to do, that is, when war comes with you.

How do we tell twenty-first-century war stories when the wars seem to go on forever? In the post-2011 surge of war stories published in America and Iraq, the defining characteristic is the depiction of combat violence that crosses borders, overtakes civilian spaces, and disrupts chronology. In The War Comes with You: Enduring War in Life, Fiction, and Fantasy, Stacey Peebles picks up where her groundbreaking first book, Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq, left off. Via careful readings of fiction, memoir, and poetry by writers including Ben Fountain, Siobhan Fallon, Brian Turner, and Hassan Blasim, as well as recent superhero and Star Wars films, Peebles argues that in the face of real and fantasy "forever wars," things fall apart. Language, identities, bodies, and even the stories themselves fragment. These narratives suggest, however, that people need not accept incoherence and there is a range of meaningful responses to the experience of everywhere all-the-time war. Peebles illustrates what to do, that is, when war comes with you.