The Language of War
Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II
Published on 1. February 2005
Book
Paperback/Softback
320 pages
978-0-674-01594-4 (ISBN)
Description
The Language of War examines the relationship between language and violence, focusing on American literature from the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. James Dawes proceeds by developing 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? Authors and texts of central importance in this far-reaching study range from Louisa May Alcott and William James to William Faulkner, the Geneva Conventions, and contemporary American organizational sociology and language theory.
The consensus approach in literary studies over the past twenty years has been to treat language as an extension of violence. The idea that there might be an inverse relation between language and violence, says Dawes, has all too rarely influenced the dominant voices in literary studies today. This is an ambitious project that not only makes a serious contribution to American literary history, but also challenges some of the leading theoretical assumptions of our day.
The consensus approach in literary studies over the past twenty years has been to treat language as an extension of violence. The idea that there might be an inverse relation between language and violence, says Dawes, has all too rarely influenced the dominant voices in literary studies today. This is an ambitious project that not only makes a serious contribution to American literary history, but also challenges some of the leading theoretical assumptions of our day.
Reviews / Votes
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 *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge, Mass
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
US School Grade: College Graduate Student
Illustrations
none
Dimensions
Height: 227 mm
Width: 146 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
476 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-674-01594-4 (9780674015944)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Previous edition
James Dawes
The Language of War
Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War Through World War II
Book
02/2002
Harvard University Press
€62.03
Article exhausted; check for reprint
Person
James Dawes is DeWitt Wallace Professor of English at Macalester College.
Content
Acknowledgments Introduction Language and Violence: The Civil War and Literary and Cultural Theory 1. Counting on the Battlefield: Literature and Philosophy after the Civil War 2. Care and Creation: The Anglo-American Modernists 3. Freedom, Luck, and Catastrophe: Ernest Hemingway, John Dewey, and Immanuel Kant 4. Trauma and the Structure of Social Norms: Literature and Theory between the Wars 5. Language, Violence, and Bureaucracy: William Faulkner, Joseph Heller, and Organizational Sociology 6. Total War, Anomie, and Human Rights Law Notes Index