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
James Dawes is DeWitt Wallace Professor of English at Macalester College.
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 *
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