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

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?

Table of Contents:
I Introduction. Language and Violence: The Civil War and Literary and Cultural Theory I I Counting on the Battlefield: Literature and Philosophy after the Civil War 24 2 Care and Creation: The Anglo-American Moderists 69 3 Freedom, Luck, and Catastrophe: Ernest Hemingway, John Dewey, and Immanuel Kant 107 4 Trauma and the Structure of Social Norms: Literature and Theory between the Wars 131 SLanguage, Violence, and Bureaucracy: William Faulkner, Joseph Heller, and Organizational Sociology 157 6 Total War, Anomie, and Human Rights Law 192 Notes 221 Index 301 I ~ , : 1:

About the Author :
James Dawes is Professor of English and Director of the Program in Human Rights and Humanitarianism at Macalester College.

Review :
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 20021001 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