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In his article "Nation in Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers" Brent M. Smith-Casanueva explores the commonalities between the antiwar narratives of Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Clint Eastwood's film Flags of our Fathers (2006). Taking the position that narration of nation must be considered a site of hegemonic struggle, Smith-Casanueva argues that both texts employ a similar deconstructive logic to subvert the nationalist discourses and dominant war narratives of their respective nations and the national myths constructed through these narratives. In particular, both All Quiet on the Western Front and Flags of our Fathers destabilize narration of nation through challenging dominant war narratives' claim to a universality of national interests and the essentializing character of national myth, as well as through disrupting the linear temporality of narration of nation. Brent M. Smith-Casanueva, "Nation in Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers" page 2 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.1 (2012):  Brent M. SMITH-CASANUEVA Nation in Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers At first glance, Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front and Clint Eastwood's 2006 film Flags of our Fathers may seem to have little in common, other than perhaps their general designation as antiwar texts. Remarque's novel, written and published in Weimar-era Germany, chronicles the experience of a German soldier during World War I while Eastwood's film focuses on the lives of three U.S. soldiers fighting in World War II immortalized in the classic picture of the Iwo Jima flag-raising. However, a closer look reveals significant commonalities between the texts, the first of which is the historical context of their production. All Quiet and Flags both emerged during periods of national insecurity and instability following a national crisis. For All Quiet, this national crisis was the German defeat in World War I and the preceding economic and political insecurity of the inter-war period and for Flags the crisis was the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the United States' inability to achieve definite military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq. Beyond this commonality in historical context, there is a more significant, although not unrelated, similarity between the texts, one that points to their importance as "resistant" products of culture. Both of these texts, I argue, employ a similar deconstructive logic to subvert the nationalist discourses and dominant war narratives of their respective nations and the national myths constructed through these narratives reproduced both through official discourse and cultural production. I address the ways in which All Quiet and Flags are able to subvert national imagery and dominant war narratives. I begin, then, by establishing a theoretical context, drawing on the work of Benedict Anderson and Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, and Antonio Gramsci, for both the significance of the novel and the film to national imagery and the potential for destabilizing narration of nation through these narrative forms. I then proceed to examine the importance of war narratives for national imagining and the specific ways in which these narratives function in order to explore how All Quiet and Flags challenge and subvert these narratives. The novel and film as narrative forms have both become central to the imagining of nation. As Anderson argues, the emergence of the popular novel, along with that of the newspaper in eighteenth century Europe was connected to the development of nationalism. Anderson credits the development of print capitalism and the book as the "first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity" (34) as central in the formation of national consciousness. The most significant aspect of the popular novel, in terms of the national imagery was its narrative temporality which allowed it to reproduce a sense of "homogenous, empty time" through narrating an individual's or community's movement through this time. As Anderson notes, this "idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history" (26). Thus, both the increased availability of the novel to a mass audience and its narrative temporality were inseparable from the development of national consciousness in modernity. In many ways, the emergence of cinema in the late nineteenth century represented a continuation in the developments that Anderson addresses. As Shohat and Stam note, the film "inherited the social role of the nineteenth-century realist novel in relation to national imaginaries", communicating the 'homogeneous, empty time' of the nation through arranging events and actions into a temporally linear narrative (102). To the temporal narrative logic of the novel, the film adds a gregarious consumption ritual that, unlike the private consumption of a novel, allows for the gathering of a community that "homologizes, in a sense, the symbolic gathering of the nation." The movie audience becomes a sort of "provisional 'nation' forged by spectatorship" (103). Furthermore, Shohat and Stam suggest, the film also overcame the obstacle of literacy that prevented literature from reaching a truly mass audience. The accessibility of cinema thus allowed for the fostering of national consciousness on a truly national scale. If the novel and the film represent the privileged forms for narration of nation, then they also represent the terrain on which this narration can be challenged and subverted. This potential for resistance and subversion becomes a real possibility if we consider narration of nation as a manifestation of hegemonic power. In Gramsci's formulation, hegemony represents a kind of "compromise equilibrium" that "presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised" (86). Thus hegemony is not an absolute Brent M. Smith-Casanueva, "Nation in Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers" page 3 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.1 (2012):  imposition of the interests of the dominant on those of the subordinated. Rather, it is a process through which "previously germinated ideologies ... come into confrontation and conflict, until only one of them, or at least a single combination of them, tends to prevail, to gain the upper hand, to propagate itself throughout society – bringing about not only unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity, posing all the questions around which the struggle rages not on a corporate but on a 'universal plane', and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups" (86). This process of negotiation, while never in equal measure and always with limits, opens up the dominant ideology to challenges which have the potential to shift the equilibrium. If we conceive of the nation as "a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria ... between the interests of the fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups" (Gramsci 86), narration of nation becomes a necessarily indeterminate and contingent terrain. Thus, there is the possibility for what Homi Bhabha terms "minority discourses" which add to, without adding up to, the dominant discourse to destabilize the "compromise equilibrium" of narration of nation (222-23). I argue that All Quiet and Flags destabilize this equilibrium by resisting narration of nation through subverting dominant war narratives and structures of national mythilogy. Wars play an essential role in the construction of national identity as nationalism is linked to warfare. As Gopal Balakrishnan points out, "the state possesses a historical purpose and collective meaning because it organizes a community into a sovereign polity ready for war. It is during war that the nation is imagined as a community embodying ultimate values" (qtd. in Hogan 216). Wars are also inseparable from the national historical imagination as they become one of the central rhetorical figures in narration of nation. Past conflicts become part of a mythical history that the nation returns to in times of struggle and insecurity to re-imagine the nation's present. The narration of present conflicts is no less essential to national imagination. As Kevin Foster demonstrates in his account of narratives emerging during and after the Falklands War, the arrangement of information and events into narrative form by the media, memoir writers, and others was more important in re-constructing British national identity than any "real" events of the war. These war narratives become produced and reproduced at various sites, constructed both in the official military/political discourse and in literary, cinematic, or media discourses. As mentioned above, the novel and the film represent particularly significant sites for the construction of national narratives. To understand the dominant war narratives that All Quiet and Flags challenge, we can look at Ernst Jünger's novel Storm of Steel and Steven Spielberg's film Saving Private Ryan as narratives representing the dominant national ideology of their respective nations and eras. Jünger's Storm of Steel presented the pro-war and nationalistic literary narrative of Germany's World War I experience through its glorification of combat and adherence to the prototypical hero narrative. Saving Private Ryan is constructed similarly as a narrative of the United States' involvement in World War II and that reproduced a legitimation of this involvement, as well as its involvement in following wars, and an affirmation of national identity. Particu