The Apocalyptic Adventures of Private Winfred Scott Biegle
Department
English
Document Type
Book
Files
Description
A modernist novel, describing a dystopian military in the imaginary dictatorship of Atlantis, written more than a half century ago when the author was a conscript in the army during the Cold War. As editor of the post newspaper at the Granite City Engineer Depot, Clifford Davidson was in a privileged position for observing the military mentality of the time, in particular the propensity for bullying intended to turn men into mindless killing machines. From other soldiers he was also able to hear disturbing stories at first hand about World War II and the very recent Korean War, only concluded four years earlier. Private Biegle was invented as an anti-hero to satirize those who those accepted authoritarianism as normative and patriotism as uncritical obedience. In other words, in the pages of the novel the author was exploring the very subversion of civil society by probing the implications of the master-slave dichotomy that had been introduced by Hegel and relatively recently put to good use in feminist thought by Jessica Benjamin. But the novel also deserves to be understood as an antic expression that foreshadows the media personality Stephen Colbert, who has popularized irony for so many in this century. Those who have read it have declared it "a good read."A critical introduction to the writing of this Orwellian novel and its relation to literature of the mid-twentieth century is provided by Oscar Haugen in the Afterword. The Apocalyptic Adventures of Winfed Scott Biegle is a work previously only known to a few readers, and now is available to a larger readership in the present edition.
Call number in WMU's library
PS3554.A923 A663 2012 (Waldo Library, WMU Authors Collection, First Floor)
ISBN
978-1478254560
Publication Date
2012
Publisher
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Keywords
politics and war, abuse of Bildungsromans
Disciplines
Fiction
Citation for published book
Davidson, Clifford, and Oscar Haugen. The Apocalyptic Adventures of Private Winfred Scott Biegle. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012. Print.
Recommended Citation
Davidson, Clifford, "The Apocalyptic Adventures of Private Winfred Scott Biegle" (2012). All Books and Monographs by WMU Authors. 268.
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/books/268
Comments
afterword by Oscar Haugen