Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form - Paperback

by Paul K. Saint-Amour (Author)

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 acoercive 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-Amourillustrates 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 MadoxFord, 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 longfor a politically regressive peace.

Author Biography

Paul K. Saint-Amour is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination, winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book, and the editor of Modernism and Copyright. With Jessica Berman, he edits the Modernist Latitudes book series at Columbia University Press.