The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II

James Dawes

Published by Harvard University Press 2005

The Language of War

Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II

James Dawes

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674030268

Overview
Contents

About this book

Focusing on American literature from the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, Dawes develops two primary questions: How does the strategic violence of war affect literary, legal, and philosophical representations? And, in turn, how do such representations affect the reception and initiation of violence itself?

Reviews

This highly theoretical work examines the role language plays in making war real...The author constructs a careful philosophical understanding of 19th-century modes of situating war through various narrative and rhetorical strategies...[This book] is elegant and suited to complex philosophical inquiry.
-- B. Adler Choice

This book is a meditation on the relationship between violence and language, not only in the ways that violence impedes, corrals, or squelches speech but also in the ways the assumptions embedded in words trigger, presume, or encourage violence. The book shows the ways -- potentially -- language can challenge violence and expose the terror and silencing of war.
-- Lyde Cullen Sizer Journal of American History

The Language of War reminded me of my first reading of Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. Dawes's intellectual history of how language was used for 100 years in thinking and writing about war gives us the critical tools to understand his inquiry into the difficulties of meaning inherent in formulations of modern laws of war.
-- Thomas Palaima The Times Higher Education Supplement

Immensely readable.
-- Civil War Book Review

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction. Language and Violence: The Civil War and Literary and Cultural Theory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 Counting on the Battlefield: Literature and Philosophy after the Civil War Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	24
2 Care and Creation: The Anglo-American Modernists Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
3 Freedom, Luck, and Catastrophe: Ernest Hemingway, John Dewey, and Immanuel Kant Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	107
4 Trauma and the Structure of Social Norms: Literature and Theory between the Wars Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	131
5 Language, Violence, and Bureaucracy: William Faulkner, Joseph Heller, and Organizational Sociology Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
6 Total War, Anomie, and Human Rights Law Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	192
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	301

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 320

eBook

Published: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 9780674030268