WAR IMAGERY AND MORAL COGNITION IN WORLD LITERATURE

Abstract

This article examines how world literature constructs the image of war as a multi-layered cultural form that mediates violence, restructures perception, and recalibrates moral language. A comparative reading is conducted across epic, realist, modernist, testimonial, and postmemory texts, with special attention to recurrent narrative devices that convert battlefield experience into communicable meaning. The analysis demonstrates that war imagery stabilizes around a small set of representational regimes, yet each regime remains historically elastic and medium-sensitive, shifting with photography, archival thinking, and documentary prose. A typology is proposed that links formal choices to ethical effects, including irony, dehumanization, intimate grief, and the rhetoric of necessity. The findings clarify how literary traditions forecast future conflicts by rehearsing interpretive templates, so that reading becomes a training of moral attention rather than a passive consumption of plots. The article concludes by outlining how this typology can guide future corpus based studies of war narratives across languages and media.