Male Identity and Martial Codes of Honor: A Comparison of the War Memoirs of Robert Graves, Ernst Junger, and Kande Kamara
This article compares and contrasts the memoirs of three combatants from the First World War: Robert Graves, Ernst Jünger, and the West African Tirailleur Kande Kamara. Though the soldiers' distinctive cultural heritage and service in the British, German, and French colonial armies, respectively, informed each interpretation, they shared similar, though particular, concepts of male identity and military duty that were socially specific, which they strove to honor. Their interpretations addressed particular audiences—categorized as "the victorious," "the defeated," and "the exploited"—that contributed to and reflected the political liturgies informing mass movements—especially in Germany and the Third World—throughout the twentieth century.
‘This place isn't worth the left boot of one of our boys’: Geopolitics, militarism and memoirs of the Afghanistan war
This paper argues for the continued significance of the text as a source and focus in critical geopolitical inquiry. It establishes the utility of the military memoir in explorations of popular contemporary geopolitical imaginaries, and considers the memoir as a vector of militarism. The paper examines the memoirs written by military personnel about service in Afghanistan with the British armed forces, specifically about deployments to Helmand province between 2006 and 2012. The paper explores how Afghanistan is scripted through these texts, focussing on the explanations for deployment articulated by their authors, on the representations they contain and promote about other combatants and about civilian non-combatants, and the constitution and expression of danger in the spaces and places of military action which these texts construct and convey. The paper then turns to consider how a reading of the military memoir with reference to the genre of testimonio might extend and inform our understanding and use of these texts as a source for exploring popular geopolitics and militarism.
Fungal Biotransformations in Pharmaceutical Sciences
The regio- and stereoselective conversion of complex substrates represents one of the major advantage of microbial biotransformation. This chapter covers the biocatalytic capacities of fungi to derivatize bioactive small molecules, both from natural sources and from synthetic compounds. We focus particularly on sterol and taxane biotransformation. We also present examples at the interface of biotransformation and pathway engineering using recombinant organisms, with an emphasis on the production of lovastatin derivatives. Finally, we highlight selected studies on fungal xenometabolism which serves as a model to study the breakdown of drugs in mammals.