Basic Rules of Combat: An Original Manuscript with an Essay on the Poetics of War Narratives and the Intersection of Ethnographic Regionalism, Geography, and Memory

Abstract

This dissertation is a hybrid project that includes a critical essay and a memoir. The critical portion focuses on the poetics of war narratives at the intersection of ethnographic regionalism, geography, and memory. Ethnographic regionalism in relation to America’s wars produces a current war narrative poetic through fetishization; singular identities become fused with foreign battlefields, thereby supplanting and replacing the enemy’s identity with the enemy’s own landscape. Texts of war, however, are not only cartographic in nature, but are also creative geographies. The poetics of deep time, close observation, and visualizing how bodies move through space and time renders the invisible visible and speaks up for humanity and against the barbarism of war. The processes of traumatic memory and war produce a poetics all their own, most often by authorial intrusions, comfort in utilizing metafictive and/or autofictive techniques, and nonlinear timelines that mimic how one experiences chaos, confusion, and pain. The creative portion of the dissertation tries to see the intersection of these three critical portals, that of ethnography, geography, and memory, as borders of exchange. It also embodies representations of ethnography, geography and memory as palimpsests, which, when combined with the concept of deep time, creates a more truthful autoethnographic account of my lived experience. Its structure is representative of the ways in which memory functions and places it in direct conversation with Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story.”