미디어, 전쟁, 전쟁시

The Media, War, and War Poetry by Mitsuye Yamada, Elizabeth Bishop, and Muriel Rukeyser

The role of the US media during war has always been subject to controversy due to their alleged collusion with the reigning ideology of the day. As Jean Baudrillard recently pointed out, the manipulated battlefield images of the Gulf War on CNN, for instance, served to justify US intervention in the region and concretize the seeming inevitability of US hegemony in the post-Cold War era. Yet, questions concerning the role of the media in relation to state propaganda are as old as World War II. It is thus no accident that Mitsuye Yamada, Elizabeth Bishop, and Muriel Rukeyser problematize the views of wartime media in their war poems, “Evacuation,” “12 O’Clock News,” and “Poem,” respectively. These works do not simply criticize the position of the media but address the specific social issues that war report forces the poets to confront: the neglected complexity of Japanese Americans’ identity, the imperialistic gaze on non-Western society, and the role of poetry during war. These women poets were not combatants on the battlefield, but they successfully draw readers’ attention to the repercussions of war on the home front and ultimately invite us to reconsider the gendered definition of traditional war poetry and the pervasive presence of war in American society.