Synopses & Reviews
Tense Future falls into two parts. The first develops a critical account of total war discourse and addresses the resistant potential of acts, including acts of writing, before a future that looks barred or predetermined by war. Part two shifts the focus to long interwar narratives that pit both their scale and their formal turbulence against total war's portrait of the social totality, producing both ripostes and alternatives to that portrait in the practice of literary encyclopedism. The book's introduction grounds both parts in the claim that industrialized warfare, particularly the aerial bombing of cities, intensifies an under-examined form of collective traumatization: a pretraumatic syndrome in which the anticipation of future-conditional violence induces psychic wounds. Situating this claim in relation to other scholarship on "critical futurities," Saint-Amour discusses its ramifications for trauma studies, historical narratives generally, and the historiography of the interwar period in particular. The introduction ends with an account of the weak theory of modernism now structuring the field of modernist studies, and of weak theory's special suitability for opposing total war, that strongest of strong theories.
Synopsis
We know that trauma can leave syndromes in its wake. But can the anticipation of violence be a form of violence as well? Tense Future argues that it can-that twentieth-century war technologies and practices, particularly the aerial bombing of population centers, introduced non-combatants to a coercive and traumatizing expectation. During wartime, civilians braced for the next raid; during peacetime they braced for the next war. The pre-traumatic stress they experienced permeates the century's public debates and cultural works. In a series of groundbreaking readings, Saint-Amour illustrates how air war prophets theorized the wounding power of anticipation, how archive theory changed course in war's shadow, and how speculative fiction conjured visions of a civilizational collapse that would end literacy itself. And in this book's central chapters, he shows us how Ford Madox Ford, Robert Musil, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and other interwar modernist writers faced the memory of one war and the prospect of another, some by pitting their fictions' encyclopedic scale and formal turbulence against total war, others by conceding war's inevitability while refusing to long for a politically regressive peace.
Total war: a conflict that exempts no one, disregarding any difference between soldier and civilian. Tense Future forever alters our understanding of the concept of total war by tracing its emergence during the First World War, its incubation in air power theory between the wars, and above all its profound partiality. For total war, during most of the twentieth century, meant conflict between imperial nation states; it did not include the violence those states routinely visited on colonial subjects during peacetime. Tacking back and forth between metropole and colony, between world war and police action, Saint-Amour describes the interwar refashioning of a world system of violence-production, one that remains largely intact in our own moment of perpetual interwar.
About the Author
Paul K. Saint-Amour is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. President of the Modernist Studies Association, he currently coedits the Modernist Latitudes series published by Columbia UP. His previous books include The Copywrights: Copyright and the Literary Imagination (Cornell UP, 2003) and the edited volume Modernism and Copyright (OUP, 2010).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Traumatic Earliness
I. Bukimi
II. The Precincts of Time
III. Collective Psychosis
Facing Trauma
Critical Futurities
Three Interwars
Weak Modernism
Part One
1. On the Partiality of Total War
The Case of L. E. O. Charlton
Intimations of Totality
Interwar Air Power Theory
Rival Preemptions of Law and War
National Totality and Colonial Air Control
Bombing Display I
Bombing Display II
2. Perpetual Suspense: Virginia Woolf's Wartime Gothic
Morphologies of Suspense
Mark Time
Mrs. Dalloway and the Gaze of Total War
The Years: Immunities Lost and Found
"Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid"
3. Fantasias of the Archive: Hamilton's Savage and Jenkinson's Manual
A Promise of Terror to Come
Savage Foreclosures
Declining Fertility
Jenkinson's Manual
War Archives: Theory and Performance
Thoughts on Archives in an Air Raid
The Death Drive of the Archive
Part Two
4. Encyclopedic Modernism
Against Epic
Revisiting the Encyclopédie
The Eleventh
Encyclopedic Narrative
Modern Epic
Pace Bersani
5. The Shield of Ulysses
Ulysses' Encyclopedism
Encyclopedia Prophetica
Urban Violence and Amity Lines
Theater of Total War
Scattering
6. War Shadowing: Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End
Uncyclopedia Britannica
Total Worry
Futures in Furniture
Conclusion: Perpetual Interwar
Appendix: Chapter Abstracts
Bibliography
Index