This chapter addresses the representation of war in the American graphic novel. It begins with a historical discussion of the decline of the war comic in light of social change in the 1960s. While pop art appropriation of war comics questioned the jingoistic content of the tradition, older-generation comics artists (Milton Caniff, Jack Kubert, et al.) and the National Cartoonist Society continued to promote American militarism in their work. In this culturally compromised context, war comics declined in status and circulation, facilitating the rise of the American graphic novel, which inverted the aesthetics of the old war comics. By contrast, war graphic novels account for the suffering of war, reveal personal and family tragedies, bring forward women’s experiences, and (in translation) offer an international perspective. The recognition given to graphic novels in the public sphere has also facilitated the exhibition and republication of previously marginalized works (e.g., material from Vietnam War veteran Vernon Grant). The chapter concludes with a discussion of Florent Silloray’s graphic novel biography of the famous war photographer Robert Capa, which includes a new theorization of the status of the war image and the human cost of military violence.

This chapter focuses on the New York School of poetry and traces its origins, its history, and its legacy. It discusses the importance of the avant-garde tradition and visual art, especially Abstract Expressionism, to the poets of the New York School, and examines the most important formal innovations and thematic concerns of the poets at its heart. The chapter focuses on the work of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest, along with poets of the movement’s second generation, including Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Bernadette Mayer.

The chapter analyzes how Don DeLillo’s novel Mao II critically refracts TV’s immediacy effects to explore the cultural function that literature performs within the increasingly commodified market dynamics of mass media communication. The chapter argues that DeLillo accomplishes a paradoxical feat: he tells the story of a retrograde writer who loses his life in a futile attempt to resist the commercialization of his work; yet DeLillo suffuses this allegorical tale about the death of an author in the age of mass media and consumer culture with detailed ekphrastic descriptions of TV news footage, photographs, and pop art that ultimately confirm the capacity of literature to respond in innovative ways to the predominance of visual media, the misapprehension of televisual images as real, and the increasing commodification of literature and art. Published as American culture was turning digital, the novel provides an apt terminus for my study of how American writers reworked the immediacy effects of analog new visual media to renew literary culture.