Description
Book SynopsisTense Future falls into two parts. The first develops a critical account of total war discourse and addresses the resistant potential of acts, including acts of writing, before a future that looks barred or predetermined by war. Part two shifts the focus to long interwar narratives that pit both their scale and their formal turbulence against total war''s portrait of the social totality, producing both ripostes and alternatives to that portrait in the practice of literary encyclopedism. The book''s introduction grounds both parts in the claim that industrialized warfare, particularly the aerial bombing of cities, intensifies an under-examined form of collective traumatization: a pretraumatic syndrome in which the anticipation of future-conditional violence induces psychic wounds. Situating this claim in relation to other scholarship on critical futurities, Saint-Amour discusses its ramifications for trauma studies, historical narratives generally, and the historiography of the interwar
Trade ReviewBy moving our vision from earth to sky, from soldiers in the trenches to civilians under air raids, Paul Saint-Amour makes rich and surprising our understanding of the twentieth-century and its literature. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and we ourselves emerge in the arresting light of this first modern collective anxiety. * Elaine Scarry, author of Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom *
This book is a tour de force, introducing an entirely new approach to the modernist imagination. Saint-Amour makes us hear the undertones of menace in interwar literature, thereby reconfiguring modernist fiction as meditations on disasters to come. * Jay Winter, author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History *
Paul Saint-Amour reinterprets culture during the years between World War I and World War II as an era of anxious anticipation. Thoughtful, penetrating, and important, Tense Future expands our understanding of war's destructive power. * Mary L. Dudziak, author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences *
Tense Future moves fluently through the cultural records of the First World War, interwar, Second World War, and Cold War. Creating a wholly new archive, Saint-Amour does nothing less than shift the tense of imaginative action in the literature of major record: from memory, which Paul Fussell established as its primary imaginative circumstance, to anticipation; from reverie to dread. Our way of reading the literature of a century of war will be changed by this comprehensive and compelling account. * Vincent Sherry, author of Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence *
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. * W. T. Martin, CHOICE *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ; 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 Encyclopedie ; 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
