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Summary
Summary
Manliness has always been linked to physical prowess and to war; indeed the warrior has been the archetypal man across countless cultures throughout time. In this magisterial excursion through literature, history, warfare, and sociology, one of our most prominent scholars tracks the complex relationship between the changing methods and goals of warfare and shifting models of manhood. This journey takes us from the citizen soldiers of ancient Greece to the medieval knights to the misogynistic terrorists of Al Qaeda.
As he chronicles these transformations, Leo Braudy weighs the significance of everything from weapon technology to the hairstyles favored during different eras. He offers fresh insights on codes of war and codes of racial purity, and on cultural and historical figures from Socrates to Don Quixote to Napoleon to Custer to Rambo. Epic in scope and free of academic jargon, From Chivalry to Terrorism is a masterwork of scholarship that is both accessible and breathtakingly ambitious.
Author Notes
Leo Braudy is University Professor and Bing Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He previously taught at Yale, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a Senior Scholar Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy, as well as a writer-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. His book, Jean Renoir: The World of His Films , was a finalist for the National Book Award. Another of his books, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History , was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has written for the New York Times , the Washington Post , and Harper's . Mr. Braudy lives with his wife in Los Angeles.
Reviews 4
Publisher's Weekly Review
This superlative work of cultural history eloquently addresses an age-old crisis of masculinity: should a man be "an individual of prowess in personal combat, or a largely anonymous weapons-wielder in ranks, slaying from a distance?" In 57 literate essays, USC professor Braudy ranges from the Homeric Age to September 11th, revealing an arc of ideas that show how our notions of "man" and "warrior" have long been related. In the course of recording Western confusions about the way men should behave in war, Braudy takes stock of Achilles, Odysseus, Don Quixote, Restoration English poetry on premature ejaculation, General Custer, T. E. Lawrence and many, many other actual and fictional figures. The book's focus narrows somewhat after WWI. The Vietnam War, Braudy writes, may have been the last "literary war," and the antiwar movement against it showed that "without war, the absolute difference between male and female may collapse under its own weight, deprived of a crucial support." A final chapter on "Terrorism as a Gender War" argues that in today's world "the soldier is no longer a member of an actual army but of, at most, a small group, prepared carefully by his recruiters for certain death." Braudy, whose study of fame, The Frenzy of Renown, was a finalist for the NBCC Award in 1987, neglects one current aspect of the debate-women in the military-but he manages the Herculean task of collating textual data and interpretations in jargon-free prose, accompanying his observations with dry wit and a superior selection of illustrations. His book is an important contribution to the library of military history as well as to the growing field of gender studies. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Booklist Review
Which comes first--war or masculinity? The complex and shifting relationship between the two is the subject of this provocative selection, which reads as both military history and an exploration of gender. Braudy is interested in what it is to be a man, particularly in wartime, and how the technological evolution of warfare has altered what makes a male a man. Understanding masculine sexual identity is the key, he argues, particularly in the early modern period, when stirrings of female emancipation led to fear of impotence and inadequacy, while gunpowder simultaneously blew battlefield honor into new forms. Pirates, cowboys, adventurers, and sports figures all emerge as the modern world's masculine archetypes, and manliness in combat becomes a new way of coping with the madness of war. Criticizing innate notions of masculinity while praising the nobility of manliness' many mutable forms, Braudy's synthesis is intelligent and wide ranging (T. E. Lawrence and seventeenth-century pornography only rarely appear in the same volume). Its gender-identity-based analysis of present-day wars is also timely and appropriate. --Brendan Driscoll Copyright 2003 Booklist
Choice Review
Braudy (English, Univ. of Southern California) has accepted the enormous challenge (particularly given the contemporary confusion of what it means to be a man, especially in the US) of examining the relationship between war and masculinity from the Middle Ages through the September 11, 2001 attacks. The author writes as a Renaissance man in his juxtaposition of material from a wide variety of intellectual areas: history, economics, political science, religion, philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology, biology, music, the arts (including motion pictures and television), and, of course, literature--classic and popular. His thesis is organized into 57 chapters by subject rather than chronologically. The result is that, for instance, medieval knighthood and the contemporary professional soldier are treated within the same paragraph, an approach that at times generates confusion and suggests a surface treatment of some issues. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to be impressed by the changing nature of manhood or masculinity as it is portrayed in this voluminous work. Braudy has generated an incredibly complex configuration in his dramatically important narrative, which suggests that without war, distinct and definitive components of masculinity may dissipate. Criticisms are minimal (some minor errors of omission of little consequence). A well-written and interesting scholarly work. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. J. Stanley emeritus, Towson University
Library Journal Review
In what he calls a work of synthesis, Braudy (Univ. of Southern California) combines historical record with excerpts from literature, statistics, and a cultural examination of the East and West to present a changing image of the "masculine" as shaped particularly by the phenomenon of war. His book is arranged topically, tracing the ever-shifting nuances of the meaning of maleness from the Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century, touching on the ancient Greeks and Romans. Etymological information, cultural literary criticism, and social analysis support the main thesis: that what is perceived to be "true masculinity" in any given era is shaped by many factors, especially the need to either keep or defend the peace. The shape and character of military men is outlined, from the knight to the Vietnam veteran to the "holy" warrior, and fictional characters and nonfiction writers are enlisted in the efforts to both illustrate and critique the constitution of masculinity. The impact of technological progress and scientific discoveries on the shaping of gender definition is a theme throughout, and attitudes toward homosexuality and effeminacy are considered. Other books have examined the evolution and definition of masculinity (e.g., Michael Kimmel's Manhood in America), but the strength of Braudy's contribution is in the detailed historical research and non-prescriptive scholarly tone. Recommended for academic and research libraries. In contrast, Newell's work is an unapologetic attempt to reeducate Americans about the nature of manliness, as it addresses not the question "What is a man?" but "What is a good man?" Newell (political science & philosophy, Carleton Univ. in Ottawa; What Is a Man?; Bankrupt Education) openly calls for a return to the pre-1950s tradition of academics writing for popular appeal. He combines a critique of modern immorality with praise of "the five paths to manliness," around which the chapters are constructed: love, courage, pride, family, and country. Violent events such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine tragedy, and 9/11 are a "wake-up call" for society to recognize that we have strayed so far from the values-based foundation of the past that sociopathic repercussions are the result. Newell makes suggestions for correcting the degradation of the five virtues. Without resolving the tension inherent in his argument, Newell touts equality of the sexes while at the same time stating that gender roles may not be created but inherent. Some readers may take umbrage at the labeling of particular virtues as "manly" and the use of the word should in relation to gender definitions. Though the intended audience is any adult reader interested in the concepts of character development and moral obligation in relation to masculinity, the tone may be too erudite to appeal to the popular market. Appropriate for large public and academic libraries. [Braudy's book was previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/03.]-Lori Carabello, Ephrata P.L., PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 REMEMBER MY NAME Like the elephant sought by the six blind men, or the electron that changes position depending on when it is observed, masculinity must be mapped rather than merely discovered. Not only is it elusive, but there are also those with vested interests in keeping it mono-lithic and mysterious. Is masculinity, for example, entirely identifiable with patriarchy? That is, does masculinity in any age refer primarily to the power over groups considered to be weaker and more marginal to society-groups usually composed of women but also of men considered to be at best incomplete or imperfect, and at worst barely human? Certainly there have been many men, both in and out of public power, who believed and still believe this. But how was their own masculinity learned? Did it come directly from the experience of having the particular kind of male body their culture approved? Or are there a whole variety of preliminary and partial models, each with its own divergence from the grand norm and each with its contradiction of it? One clue might be in the language of masculinity. Where do the words designating the male come from? What do they mean? In the West at least, this language has been heavily influenced by both the language of wartime masculinity (or fashioned in contrast to the language used to describe, say, the saint or the sage) and the language of social class. Man existed long before "masculine," a word that first appears in English in the Middle Ages as a French import used to designate not specific masculine characteristics so much as the general difference between male and female, whether in plants, animals, or human beings. Then, with the Norman conquest and the adoption of Norman-French as the standard for all educated discourse, "masculine" became a more frequent usage.* "Man," as the older term, has a more tangled history. It goes back to an Indo-European root meaning "earth" that descends equally into "human" and "humus." There are two Latin words for man: vir and homo. Homo, related to the Greek word for "one" or "single," is the more general term-man in the abstract. It descends into the Romance languages fairly directly: uomo (Italian), homme (French), hombre (Spanish), and the impersonal pronoun in French, on. Vir in contrast refers to a man as defined by specific male qualities, and is the root of "virile" as well as "virtue," an association that prompted Plutarch in his biography of Coriolanus to complain that the Romans so valued military prowess that they made it stand for all human virtues, even though it refers to only one of them. Arma virumque cano, says Virgil at the beginning of the Aeneid, his epic poem of the founding of Rome: "I sing of arms and the man." Unlike "masculine" and "feminine," which come from Latin, the immediate origin of "man" in English is Germanic. Like "masculine," "man" exists not as a concept in itself but amid an array of other possibilities: man as distinguished from boy, man as distinguished from woman, man as distinguished from beast, man as distinguished from demon, man as distinguished from gods and God. And perhaps the English embrace of the German man owes something to its similarity to the Latin manus, commonly "hand" but also a Roman legal term for the authority that a husband has over his wife.† Much of human ritual and social organization, from the earliest tribes to contemporary societies, is preoccupied with reaffirming these distinctions-perhaps suggesting a deep-rooted human (or masculine) fear that they are arbitrary enough to be constantly in danger of erosion or forfeit. Like all distinctions, they are especially clouded in times like war, when events have pushed people, families, tribes, kingdoms, and nations to the edge. In this sense, much social ritual-initiation, marriage, preparation for war-is exorcism: the casting out of what is feared and the affirmation of what is desired. At these moments, the normal fuzziness and uncertainty of boundaries, the lack of sharp differences between aspects of human nature, have to be policed and polarized for fear that otherwise they will collapse entirely. * "Masculine" comes from the Latin masculinus, which is itself a diminutive form of the adjective mas, meaning "male." † To this list might be added man as distinguished from eunuch, to account for the Romanian word for man, barbat (bearded). Contrary to the argument that patriarchal society consistently values the masculine in any polarized distinction, "man" is not always the superior term in all groups. Latin writers often used homo to refer to a man who is somehow not free, whether socially subordinate or otherwise dependent-a meaning retained in the modern use of "homage," which originally referred to the feudal ceremony of allegiance of a vassal to his lord. Similarly, one of the earliest uses of man in Old English was to designate a subordinate, a vassal, even a servant, as in the phrase "my man," and the early frequency of a phrase like "free man" implies that perhaps men in general were not free. It took some time before all men were said to be created equal, and it is not until the eighteenth century that "man" was used to refer to some abstract idea of human nature in general. Until then, the positive connotations of "man" referred almost exclusively to the behavior (often military) of a man of rank, an aristocrat, as in the suggestive relation in German between heer (army) and the honorific herr (lord, master). It may seem to be an occasion for obvious Freudian mockery that a frequent Anglo-Saxon word for male human beings as well as animals is wæpned (weaponed). But even though wæpen could also mean "penis," we should remember that only a particular class of men had the wealth and the social sanction to carry weapons, and so the interplay between the words for "man," the words for "man of high rank," and the words for "warrior" has a long history. Thus in the eighth-century heroic poem Beowulf, written in Anglo-Saxon but telling the story of a sixth-century hero of the Danes, man appears in such compounds as feond mancynnes (enemy of mankind), while what translators usually call "manly behavior" or "heroic prowess" is referred to as eorlic ellen (the power of an earl, or noble) while "manly deeds" are eorlscipe efnde (the doings of earlship). Similarly, in The Song of Roland, an eleventh-century poem written about events of the eighth century, when a knight of Charlemagne's host fights with particular bravery, he is described as being en guise de baron, a phrase usually translated as "valiantly" or "heroically," but which literally means "in the manner of a baron." Some centuries before, baron had been the French word that generally distinguished the male from the female. By the eleventh century, in a process similar to that undergone by the words for "knight," baron appears as an actual social title for those high-ranking warriors who (as in The Song of Roland) support a higher-ranking lord or king. The title, of course, still remains in English, long since divested of its exclusively warlike implications. In Spanish it has gone back down the social scale to survive as varón-a man in general.* Apart from the words themselves, much of the talk about what is "true" masculinity has also historically been tinged with, even steeped in, nostalgia for a lost masculinity. Gilgamesh begins by describing buildings of the past, "which no latter-day king, no man alive can equal." Even within the story of the Iliad itself, Nestor, the oldest of the Achaeans, frequently refers to the much greater warriors who walked the earth when he was younger, and he tries to instruct his not-so-heroic present-day comrades (heroic enough to Homer's audience and to us) in the fundamentals of battle tactics. With a similar longing after past greatness, Chaucer's Knight in The Canterbury Tales, who has come so quickly to the pilgrimage from war that his clothes are still smeared with the rust of his chain mail, tells a tale set in ancient Athens, when truly heroic knights fought for honor and the love of women. One important component of masculinity thus embodies a myth of historical connection with past models and exemplars, while another looks to a future that will be different. As the Greek hero had to die young in the midst of battle in order to be considered a hero in song and legend, so one powerful form of masculinity is perpetually nostalgic in its judgments and standards. All the good men are already dead. That's how we know they're good. They may be dead, but their names and the masculinity they embodied live on to inspire future generations, and to ensure that other young, unmarried boys, who are not yet part of the settled social order, will go to war in the effort to be real men. To a certain extent this is not entirely propaganda. From the impoverished medieval knight going to war to win estates and possessions by capturing enemy nobles for ransom, to the immigrant and ghetto-raised young men whose time in the army enables them to get an education and status that could almost never have been achieved outside, the military and especially wartime situations-with their immediate rewards for battlefield heroics and cunning tactics-have facilitated class change. In both hierarchic and democratic societies, the melting pot of war, defined by its total difference from peacetime stasis, has offered an outlet for otherwise stifled ambition. Periods of war thus often give rise to eras of social movement and change, and war's crucible of possibility has often engendered different ways of being a man, on and off the battlefield, even while it seeks to confirm the values of the past. * As baron goes up the scale of social and cultural value, another early word for "man," the Old Norse karl (Old English ceorl) goes down, to become "churl" by Shakespeare's time. Compare the change from "villein" (a peasant serf) to "villain." As the prime way of being a man, military masculinity thereby can assume the double aspect of both future goal and lost ideal, both for critics who are nostalgic for the past and for those who reject it entirely. Already in the late third century b.c. the Roman playwright Plautus, drawing on Aristophanes, had defined the stock type of the miles gloriosus, the blowhard old soldier constantly living in a fantasy of his past exploits. Shakespeare in his Henry plays splits such a character in two-the hot-blooded chivalric knight Harry Hotspur and the rollicking old campaigner Sir John Falstaff, both styles of military masculinity that are finally superseded, for better or worse, by the hard-edged pragmatism of Prince Hal, the future Henry V. Whether as criticism or idealization, the presence of prior types of military masculinity in art and literature also implies a sense of generational change, especially when the wars in question are civil wars that divide families. The prewar and the postwar define a chasm that lasts long after the generations who actually participated are dead and gone. In the second half of the seventeenth century, both the French and the English looked back over the divide of their civil wars at the earlier part of the century as if it were an entirely different world. A psychoanalytic perspective might call this conflict of male generations oedipal, and thereby a "natural" part of the male character. But such oedipal periods in culture are often brought into being by the experience of war. During war, personal honor comes at the expense of the enemy, but in times of peace it is the previous generation that often must pay. In the third of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays, which deal with the civil and foreign wars of fifteenth-century England, he dramatizes the inhumanity of the conflict specifically through an image of the clash of generations. In the midst of battle, Henry VI sits despairingly on a molehill and observes first, as the stage directions say, "a Son who hath Killed his father" and then "a Father that hath killed his son." Both enter bearing the bodies of people they thought were their enemies and then discover to be their kin. With less straightforward symbolism, the heroic plays of both England and France in the later seventeenth century, in the wake of the Thirty Years' War and the English Civil Wars, often feature conflicts between energetic sons and repressive fathers over questions of honor and duty. Likewise, after World War II, American westerns are shot through with conflicts between fathers and sons (and occasionally fathers and daughters). Red River (made in 1946-47 but not released until 1948), directed by Howard Hawks, for example, explicitly presents the conflict between father John Wayne and his adopted son Montgomery Clift as mediated by Clift's Civil War experience. Both are good with their guns, but Wayne's more brutal pioneering traits must be softened by war and history into Clift's more vulnerable, sympathetic-and successful-ones. Just as Hotspur in Henry V embodies an apolitical aggressiveness that must be superseded by Henry's new version of the warrior king, so in Red River, Wayne's outmoded, domineering, but still nostalgically treasured masculinity finally has to reach some accommodation with the ways of the new generation embodied by Clift. 2 THE LANGUAGE OF THE BODY (What do you see when you turn out the light?) I can't tell you, but I know it's mine. -John Lennon and Paul McCartney, "I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends" The prime reason many might think it unlikely that masculinity has changed over time is the seemingly irreducible fact of the male body. Until new weaponry and social change brought women into military ranks, war was generally fought by men, whose physical nature seemed especially suitable for its hardships. Male bodies are generally taller and more robust than female, with longer, thicker muscles, and larger lungs, heart, and limb-to-body ratios, as well as the inability to become pregnant and thereby sacrifice valuable fighting time. In a common metaphor of male-female difference, men are hard and women are soft: "matter too soft a lasting mark to bear," wrote Alexander Pope in "To a Lady," his poem on the characters of women. Pope himself was about four-foot-six and suffered for most of his life from numerous ailments, including tuberculosis of the spine. So the seemingly absolute distinction between male and female in his hands carries an ironic charge: being soft, women were changeable and malleable, but also complex, while the hard, distinct male remained inflexibly the same. But in less self-aware contexts this robust male hardness and imperviousness to change is itself unchangingly symbolized by the upright sword, the obelisk, and the column-all too easily accepted as figures for the aggressive and ever-ready penis, the most immediately obvious physiological difference between male and female, the most basic "fact" of all. In the imagery of the absolute biological distinction between male and female, affirmed by the popular use of Freudian formulas, the ritual phallus, the phallic symbol, and the actual penis are one and the same. Excerpted from From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity by Leo Braudy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Introduction: Arms and Men | p. xi |
Part I Men and Masculinity | |
1 Remember My Name | p. 3 |
2 The Language of the Body | p. 9 |
3 Initiation: The First Wound | p. 17 |
4 Warriors and Women | p. 21 |
Part II Armor and Honor | |
5 The Purity of War | p. 29 |
6 The Warrior as Barbarian | p. 35 |
7 The Shape of Fury | p. 42 |
8 The Shield of Honor | p. 49 |
9 The Spectacle of Knighthood | p. 56 |
10 The Birth of Genealogy: Where Did Knights Come From? | p. 63 |
11 Knighthood, Christianity, and Chivalry: The Uneasy Truce | p. 71 |
12 Chivalry in Theory and Practice | p. 81 |
13 The Solitude of the Wandering Knight | p. 91 |
14 The Inspiration to Battle and the Lure of Love | p. 103 |
Part III From Armor to Personality | |
15 Uniforms and the Eclipse of Armor | p. 117 |
16 National Identity and the Cause of Religion | p. 124 |
17 Money, Nationalism, and the "Military Revolution" | p. 132 |
18 Don Quixote and the Fiction of Male Individuality | p. 143 |
19 Tests of the Body: Trial by Combat, Single Combat, and the Duel | p. 150 |
20 Pirates and Highwaymen | p. 158 |
21 The Rites of "Man" | p. 162 |
Part IV The Battle and the Sexes | |
22 War and Pornography | p. 175 |
23 Performance Anxiety | p. 185 |
24 The Opposite Sex | p. 199 |
Part V Heroes from Below | |
25 War and Antiwar | p. 217 |
26 The Field of Battle: Monarch's Eye | p. 224 |
27 The Field of Battle: Soldier's Eye | p. 233 |
28 The Uniformed Nation | p. 240 |
29 Citizens into Soldiers, Soldiers into Citizens | p. 246 |
30 Volleys or Aiming, Regular Army or Militia? | p. 256 |
Part VI The Nineteenth Century: War and National Identity | |
31 Technological Progress and the Lost Cause | p. 265 |
32 Barbaric Energy and Civilized Manners | p. 291 |
33 The Boy General | p. 302 |
34 The Statistics of Human Nature: Norms and the Abnormal | p. 310 |
35 The Specter of Degeneracy | p. 317 |
36 Masculine, Feminine, Effeminate: Sex Among the Civilized | p. 327 |
37 Sports and the Manly Ideal | p. 338 |
38 The Crucible of the 1890s | p. 349 |
39 Be Prepared | p. 363 |
Part VII The Twentieth Century: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Warrior Spirit | |
40 Honor in No-Man's-Land | p. 373 |
41 Death at a Distance | p. 383 |
42 Reason in Madness | p. 390 |
43 Primitive Body and Machine Body | p. 395 |
44 T.E. Lawrence: The Resurrection of Adventure | p. 404 |
45 Front Line at Home: Pacifism and Paramilitary Violence | p. 415 |
46 The Thirty-one Years' War: The Supreme Leader and the Solitary Champion | p. 435 |
47 The Threat of Impurity: Racism and Misogyny | p. 443 |
48 Targeting Civilians | p. 457 |
49 No Retreat and Unconditional Surrender | p. 466 |
50 Shadows on the Wall and the Common Man | p. 475 |
51 Brainwashing and the War Within | p. 483 |
52 The Solitude of the Westerner | p. 494 |
53 Postwar Male Sexuality and the Kinsey Reports | p. 501 |
54 No Body's Perfect | p. 512 |
55 War Without a Front: Vietnam and the End of the Cold War | p. 519 |
56 Make Love, Not War: Theories of Innate Aggression and the Antiwar Movement | p. 531 |
57 Parting Words: Terrorism as a Gender War | p. 542 |
Bibliography: Notes and Sources | p. 557 |
Acknowledgments | p. 591 |
Index | p. 593 |