The Language of War
Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Harvard University Press
Published:3rd Mar '05
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The Language of War examines the relationship between language and violence, focusing on American literature from the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. James Dawes proceeds by developing 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? Authors and texts of central importance in this far-reaching study range from Louisa May Alcott and William James to William Faulkner, the Geneva Conventions, and contemporary American organizational sociology and language theory.
The consensus approach in literary studies over the past twenty years has been to treat language as an extension of violence. The idea that there might be an inverse relation between language and violence, says Dawes, has all too rarely influenced the dominant voices in literary studies today. This is an ambitious project that not only makes a serious contribution to American literary history, but also challenges some of the leading theoretical assumptions of our day.
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 *
- Nominated for James Russell Lowell Prize 2001
- Nominated for John Hope Franklin Publication Prize 2002
- Nominated for PROSE Awards 2002
- Nominated for Bancroft Prize 2003
- Nominated for J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize 2003
ISBN: 9780674015944
Dimensions: 227mm x 146mm x 25mm
Weight: 476g
320 pages