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The twentieth century will be remembered for great innovation in two particular areas: art and culture, and technological advancement. Much of its prodigious technical inventiveness, however, was pressed into service in the conduct of warfare. Why, asks Margot Norris, did violence and suffering on such an immense scale fail to arouse artistic and cultural expressions powerful enough to prevent the recurrence of these horrors? Why was art not more successful -- through its use of dramatic, emotionally charged material, its ability to stir imagination and arouse empathy and outrage -- in producing an alternative to the military logic that legitimates war?Military argument in the twentieth century has been fortified by the authority of the rationalism that we attribute to science, Norris argues. Warfare is therefore legitimized by powerful discourses that art's own arsenal of styles and genres has limited power to counter. Art's difficulty in representing the violent death of entire generations or populations has been particularly acute.Choosing works that have become representative of their historically violent moment, Norris explores not only their aesthetic strategies and perspectives but also the nature of the power they wield and the ethical engagements they enable or impede. She begins by mapping the altered ethical terrain of modern technological warfare, with its increasing targeting of civilian populations for destruction. She then proceeds historically with chapters on the trench poetry and modernist poetry of World War I, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, both the book and the film of Schindler's List, the conflictinghistorical stories of the Manhattan Project, a comparison of American and Japanese accounts of Hiroshima, Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, and the effects of press censorship in the Persian Gulf War.By looking at the whole span of the century's writing on war
About the author
Margot Norris, Chancellor's Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine prior to her retirement in 2011, specializes in early twentieth-century literature, with a particular focus on the work of James Joyce. She served as president of the International James Joyce Foundation from 2004 to 2008 and is the author of numerous publications on Joyce. Her books include The Decentered Universe of "Finnegans Wake" (1976), Joyce's Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism (1992), and Virgin and Veteran Readings of "Ulysses" (2011).
Summary
An examination of why the immense violence and suffering in the 20th century failed to arouse artistic and cultural expressions powerful enough to prevent their recurrence. By looking at the whole span of the century's writing on war, it provides a critique of art's ethical limitations.
