Self-Reflexive/Self-Confident Narratives: Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary US-American Culture

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In the course of the last three years, this project has explored milblogs, weblogs written by soldiers during deployment to the war zone, as a corpus of self-confident / self-reflexive narratives - as a corpus, that is, whose formal dynamics and cultural work are predicated on an interplay of self-confidence and self-reflexivity that enables the blogs to contribute to contemporary social engagements with war and war experience. Drawing on a comparative cultural studies approach that correlates milblogs to Indigenous warrior cultures, we theorized milblogs as a practice of ceremonial storytelling which, by performing and simultaneously reflecting on ritual communicative patterns, can do socially therapeutic work. Our research has shown that is vital to complement the project by paying attention to narrative practices that are closely related to milblogs yet unfold outside the genre's parameters: ritual scripts about the return of veterans into civil society, scripts hosted by a variety of media and modes, that we call the "Homecoming Scenario." Iterated in diverse textual and performative formats, the "Homecoming Scenario" shares with milblogs its recourse to rituals of ceremonial storytelling. Moreover, it has a sequential relationship to milblogs, immediately attending to the moment of return to civilian life that milblogs prospectively anticipate. Parts of an overarching phenomenon, milblogs and instances of the "Homecoming Scenario" thus need to be interrogated together as expressions of a characteristic cultural mode by which contemporary US society engages with war experience and negotiates the relationship between military and civil society. Research on selected forms of the "Homecoming Scenario" is to be integrated with the research on milblogs conducted so far by focusing on the ways in which it throws into relief the media-specific properties of ceremonial storytelling about war experience and the temporality effects (temporal relationship between the experience of war or of homecoming and its mediation in storytelling) that inform it.