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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.
List 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
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).
Summary
A work of literary history that redefines literary modernism's development in relation to the concurrent emergence of total war and the psychological effects it created between the two world wars.
Additional text
Intricately crafted and thoroughly documented, Tense Future not only redefines the modern epic but also lays the groundwork for reconceptualizing the interwar period and perspectives on temporality.
