Crane and the Body Count

Abstract

I frame this essay about Stephen Crane's representation of the Civil War dead in terms of the question of numbers, to which these two quotations allude, albeit from the perspective of different media, different centuries, and different wars. Although General Tommy Franks of the U.S. Central Command famously claimed in March 2002 that "we don't do body counts," referring to Afghanis killed in the war against Afghanistan and speaking out of the conviction that body counts during the Vietnam War were a powerful mechanism in activating the antiwar movement, many today are doing just that. They're counting.

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