Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point
Elizabeth D. Samet, 2007
Macmillan Picador
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312427825
Summary
In 1997 Elizabeth D. Samet began teaching English at the United States Military Academy at West Point after completing her doctorate at Yale University. She encountered stark contrasts and surprising similarities between the two campuses, but nothing fully prepared her for the experience of watching her students and colleagues deploy to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other turbulent corners of the world.
What does literature—particularly the literature of war—mean to a student who is likely to encounter its reality? What is the best way to stir uninhibited classroom discussions in a setting that is designed to train students to follow orders, respect authority, and survive grueling physical and mental experiences? This is the terrain Samet traverses each semester, a challenge beautifully captured in Soldier’s Heart.
Taking its name from a World War I term for a condition akin to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Samet’s memoir offers insights into America’s newest generations of cadets. In each chapter she reflects on a rich trove of literature, from Homer’s ancient epics to the work of modern and contemporary authors such as Wilfred Owen, Virginia Woolf, Randall Jarrell, E.L. Doctorow, and Tim O’Brien.
For many of her students, reading brings solace and inspiration. For others, it sparks an examination of doubts or fears. In all cases, Samet’s courses provide exhilarating arenas for the young men and women of West Point to explore life and language. (From the publisher
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969-70
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; Ph.D. Yale University
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Elizabeth D. Samet earned her BA from Harvard and her PhD in English literature from Yale. An English professor at West Point, she has written about authority, democracy, and the relationship between literature and leadership in the military world. (From the publisher.)
Extras
From a 2008 Barnes & Noble interview:
• My first job— if you don't count a long list of part-time and summer jobs such as cleaning pools and tennis courts, working in a bookstore, teaching unhappy day-campers how to sail, and extracting DNA from corn plants in a genetics lab —is my current job: teaching English. It is one I greatly love.
• When ased what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is what she said:
A "most" question is almost impossible to answer, but certainly no work has influenced me more than Hamlet. Shakespeare's play helped me to grow as a reader and altered my worldview by revealing a character unafraid to think until it hurt. Hamlet offers insights into the nature of seeming and being, the dynamic of thought and action, the relationship between self and world. Many of the problems it dramatizes have long preoccupied me; they also seem to be of great moment to my students. Moreover, Hamlet—and maybe this is the true source of the influence—is a work that seems somehow to change, to yield new ideas, each time I read it. (Author interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
To her great credit, Samet does not draw easy conclusions in Soldier's Heart. By writing a thoughtful, attentive, stereotype-breaking book about her 10 years as a civilian teacher of literature at the Military Academy, she offers a significant perspective on the crucial social and political force of honor: a principle of behavior at the intersection of duty and imagination.
Robert Pinsky - New York Times Book Review
Soldier's Heart is an exhilarating read. It seats you in the classroom of a feisty professor who commands several fronts with easy expertise: classic film, ancient Greece, Shakespearean tragedy, modern poetry. And it seats you elbow-to-elbow with an elite crop of students whose intelligence and imagination match their courage.
John Beckman - Washington Post
Azar Nafisi meets David Lipsky in this memoir/meditation on crossing the border between the civilian world of literature and the world of the military during 10 years of teaching English at West Point. Samet's students sometimes respond to literature in ways that trouble her, but she lauds their intellectual courage as they "negotiate the multiple contradictions" of military life. Considering the link between literature and war, Samet insightfully explores how Vietnam fiction changed American literary discourse about the heroism of military service. Beyond books, Samet also examines how televised accounts of the Iraq War have turned American civilians "into war's insulated voyeurs," and discusses the gap separating her from the rest of the audience watching a documentary on Iraq. Lighter, gently humorous sections reveal Samet's feelings about army argot. She has been known to ask her mother to meet her "at 1800 instead of at 6:00 p.m.," but she forbids the use of the exclamation "Hooah!"("an affirmative expression of the warrior spirit") in her classroom. Samet is prone to digressions that break the flow of great stories, like an account of her West Point job interview. But this meditation on war, teaching and literature is sympathetic, shrewd and sometimes profound.
Publishers Weekly
In a time when words like patriotismand sacrificeare tossed about with alarming casualness, Samet (Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776-1898) offers an illuminating exploration of what these terms mean to the modern soldier. In the late 1990s, Samet left graduate school at Yale to become a literature instructor at West Point, where she has for the last decade taught the humanities to young men and women preparing to lead others into combat. Here, she illustrates how literature can transform raw cadets into reflective, conscientious leaders. She and her students struggle with the relationship between art and life as well as the true meaning of sacrifice and honor and their place in a world of peace and a world at war. Samet also reflects on the dramatic changes to the academy, its cadets, and herself over the past ten years. She focuses on the post-9/11 change in attitudes and the juxtaposition between leadership and obedience in the lives of military officers. The inevitable comparison to Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran is apt owing to both books' realistic description of the transformative power of literature. Recommended for all libraries.
Shedrick Pittman-Hassett - Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the book’s title. What are the different meanings of “soldier’s heart”? In what ways does literature address the ailments of what Wilfred Owen calls, in his poem “Insensibility” (epigraph), a heart “small drawn”?
2. Although much has been written about West Point and military life in America, an English professor’s point of view on the subject is rare. What specific insights on this world does Samet offer as a civilian and a humanities professor at a military academy? How is her portrait of military life different from others you have read?
3. How does Samet’s description of her students and former students compare to your stereotypes of soldiers? What are those stereotypes? How does Soldier’s Heart confirm or challenge them?
4. Chapter 1, “Not Your Father’s Army,” touches on the myths and traditions that define West Point, and military life more generally, by alluding to the literature that shaped the experiences of past cadets. Which aspects of the past remain vibrant on campus? Which aspects are radically different in the twenty-first century?
5. Samet writes that she hears the term relevance more and more in informal conversations about the education and training of cadets. How are humanities courses different from military training at West Point? What do such courses contribute to the preparation of cadets? What is the difference between education and training? How do you view the purpose of higher education in general, and the role of literature and the arts within it?
6. How has teaching at West Point changed Samet’s experience of literature? How might her relationship to literature and teaching have been different if she had taken a position at a liberal-arts college instead of at West Point? How does her teaching style compare to that of English teachers from your past?
7. Samet’s deployed colleagues and former students write to her with rich observations about their favorite literary works. In what ways does literature help them understand their experience of war? What do their reading choices reveal about that experience?
8. The author’s previous book explores the tension between liberty and obedience in nineteenth-century America, a dynamic she also explores in Soldier’s Heart. How do soldiers reconcile the military’s demand for conformity with the need for innovative minds—in an all-volunteer military, no less? How do literature and creative writing serve or under-mine the need for obedience and innovative thinking? What role does literature play in forging what West Point alumnus Ulysses S. Grant called moral courage?
9. Why is writing about war one of the oldest forms of literature? What was the significance of epic poems such as Homer’s Iliad or Beowulf to the warriors of earlier ages? What will characterize the artistic legacy of war in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? What is the relationship between writing and film when it comes to describing the contemporary war experience? Is your own understanding of war shaped more by literature or by film?
10. Some of Samet’s students gravitate toward war literature, while others prefer to read about nonmilitary topics. Does their reading seem more specialized than that of their counter- parts at civilian colleges? What works would you include on a syllabus of assignments for cadets? What classics would you like to see distributed today in an Armed Services Edition?
11. How is the experience of a West Point cadet different from that of a college student at a typical liberal-arts college?
12. What surprised you most about the culture of West Point? How does military hierarchy influence educational practice? Do other American college campuses have comparable hierarchies? Should civilian colleges do more to emphasize the self-discipline of students?
13. Chapter 3, “Becoming Penelope, the Only Woman in the Room,” describes the ways in which gender is sometimes a factor in Samet’s teaching experience. What advantages and disadvantages come with being a woman at a male-dominated institution? What specific challenges do women at West Point face? To what degree does West Point’s recent history as a coed institution reflect the changing nature of the American military and American society? What are the effects of the stereotype associated with Penelope, a woman waiting for the warrior’s return? What role does literature play in helping the cadets think about these issues?
14. How was the author’s worldview shaped by her upbringing—by a father who enlisted in the Army Air Corps during World War II, as well as by her years at the Winsor School? How did these experiences influence her teaching?
15. Chapter 5, “Bibles, Lots of Bibles,” explores the blend of religion and politics that permeates some segments of military life. How would you describe religion’s role in the personal experiences of soldiers—at West Point and elsewhere—and its influence on national politics decisions about war and peace?
16. How did 9/11 change the role of Samet and other professors at West Point? What were your reactions to the scenes in the closing pages, which captures the difficult debates about the United States’ current and future military responsibilities?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page (summary)