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theses

This dissertation analyzes the late 1990s US remembrance of World War II utilizing Alison Landsberg’s (2004) concept of prosthetic memory. Building upon previous scholarship regarding World War II and memory (Beidler, 1998; Wood, 2006; Bodnar, 2010; Ramsay, 2015), this dissertation analyzes key works including Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Greatest Generation (1998), The Thin Red Line (1998), Medal of Honor (1999), Band of Brothers (2001), Call of Duty (2003), and The Pacific (2010) in order to better understand the version of World War II promulgated by Stephen E. Ambrose, Tom Brokaw, Steven Spielberg, and Tom Hanks. Arguing that this time period and its World War II representations are more than merely a continuation of wartime propaganda, this research investigates these works as an attempt to transfer “privately felt public memories” as originally championed by President Ronald Reagan during the 40th anniversary of D-Day. This dissertation provides a context for this late 1990s engagement with memory by reviewing collective memory theory, drawing upon historian Jay Winter’s observation of “memory booms,” and the role remembrance of previous wars, including World War I, played in how we came to remember World War II. Conservative administrations in the United Kingdom and United States during the 1980s returned a focus to ideas of tradition and heritage moored within a utopian understanding of the World War II era. Borrowing traumatic emphasis from Holocaust survivor and Vietnam post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) narratives of the 1970s, politicians such as Ronald Reagan and broadcasters such as Tom Brokaw began constructing prosthetic memories around the US combat soldier experience. Brokaw, acting as megaphone for historian Ambrose’s hyper-focus on World War II soldier oral histories, allowed the former’s honorific “The Greatest Generation” to enter the cultural lexicon. Carrying the Generation’s memory inside of you became a guilt-based duty. The construction of transferential spaces for prosthetic memories during the 1990s was also abated by the rise in computer-based processing, graphics, and sound to immerse an audience or player in a sensory overload simulation. The consequence of this construction of memory is a narrowing of perspective on the lessons of a worldwide war built upon systematic genocide and atomic weapons.

ETD_7854

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Jonathan Monroe Bullinger

doi:10.7282/T38S4SB1

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.