Picturing the Postmodern Combatant Poetic Mind:  Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet

Abstract: This study investigates the theme of battlefield consciousness in relation to an American postmodern military. Taking Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet as a case study, the paper argues that Turner casts revealing lights on the modalities of the combatant poetic consciousness. Four modalities are investigated: discrediting metanaratives (in the Lyotardian sense of the term); engaging the imperatives of the bio-neurological; conjuring up historioscopic perspectives; and centralizing otherness. Sustaining a multifaceted critique, the socio-cultural role of the combatant-poet is to subvert the media’s ennobling myth of cyberwarriors and to gauge these myths against the banal realities of an imperialist war. In short, the poetic voice in Here, Bullet, though an American combatant, is, intellectually, at war with the American postmodern military.