"Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War"

Paper Summary:

This essay looks at Tobias Wolff's "Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War". It uses Susan Sontag's "On Regarding the Pain of Others", and the observations made there interpreting them and applying them to two chapters of this book. The observations deal with the impact of television coverage of war and the audience and the meaning of war photography as interpreted by television.

From the Paper:

"This essay uses two chapters from Tobias Wolff's Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War in order to examine and interpret Susan Sontag's observations in Regarding the Pain of Others on television's portrayal of war and the direct impact that it has had on the way the audience views wars as well as the way television has re-interpreted photographic images of war. In her book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag points-out that televised coverage of the war in Vietnam marked a significant change in the way we interpret and remember war. The war in Vietnam is the first time that images of war came to us directly, through television. The audiences were intimately connected with the death and destruction that they saw on TV, becoming almost direct witnesses in the day-to-day events that took place."

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