Tense Future

Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form

Paul K. Saint-Amour

First study of literary modernism to examine the effects of total war
Transnational in scale, covering works of literature from Britain, Ireland, Germany, and the United States
Highlights canonical figures like Woolf, Joyce, Robert Musil, and Thomas Pynchon, alongside lesser known figures such as LEO Charlton

Tense Future

Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form

Paul K. Saint-Amour

Description

Tense 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 period in particular. The introduction ends with an account of the weak theory of modernism now structuring the field of modernist studies, and of weak theory's special suitability for opposing total war, that strongest of strong theories.

Tense Future

Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form

Paul K. Saint-Amour

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

Tense Future

Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form

Paul K. Saint-Amour

Author Information

Paul K. Saint-Amour, Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

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).

Tense Future

Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form

Paul K. Saint-Amour

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the 2015 Matei Calinescu Prize

Winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize Award

"By 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