In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

BOOK REVIEWS Modernism & World War I Allyson Booth. Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. χ + 186 pp. $35.00 ALLYSON BOOTH'S absorbing Postcards from the Trenches argues , centrally, that "the perceptual habits appropriate to war emerge plainly" in the "modernist form" of literature and architecture even "when war itself seems peripheral to modernist content." In an attempt to contextualize modernism within the "broader Great War culture," the author traces overlapping patterns in "novels, buildings, newspapers, poems, letters, monuments, and documents of architectural criticism and military history." Her main emphasis, however, is on the cultural articulations of the Great War rather than on the categories of modernism . This attempt to link patterns and themes from various cultural discourses seems highly promising. The study does not so much pursue an argument as circle around a broadly defined area of investigation (the Great War and modernism). Confessedly organized according to categories introduced by Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain (1985), the study divides its material into three parts: "The Shapes of Bodies," "The Shapes of Countries," and "The Shapes of Objects." The cultural material discussed under these headings is, however, far more heterogeneous than the parallelism of these titles might suggest. The seven chapters range widely. We move from the depiction of the dead ("Corpselessness" and "Corpses") to national consciousness ("Physical Borders"), the conflict between fact and fictional constructions ("Maps"), conceptions of time ("War Calendar"), attitudes to the past manifested in buildings and objects ("Forgetful Objects" and "Glass Objects"). There are so few transitions between chapters that each could, in fact, stand on its own. In what one assumes to be a modernist strategy, Postcards from the Trenches has freed itself from the constraints of the linear narrative still dominant in our critical discourse. The downside of this liberation from an overriding thesis or "master narrative" is that the study does at times give the impression of excessive arbitrariness in the selection of material and in the methodological approaches to it. There is to my mind a somewhat disconcerting tension between Booth's attempt to discover patterns of similarity and her tendency to ignore differences by taking what she needs from wherever she can find it. In Roland Barthes's terms, "engineer" and "bricoleur" seem to be struggling against each other. 197 ELT 41 : 2 1998 I would argue that, on the whole, Postcards from the Trenches makes a valuable contribution to the cultural mapping of the impact Great War had on the consciousness of those who experienced this technological mass slaughter either as combatants or civilians. Quite adept at perceiving discursive patterns, Booth often creates unexpected connections between such elements as corpses on the battlefield and corpses in modernist fiction, the missing in action and empty spaces in war memorials, the chaos of the battlefield and narrative impatience with linear time, forgetfulness in both buildings and literary texts. Although I sometimes find her attempts to pull her material together rather contrived, even strained, I appreciate the intellectual energy that mobilizes her observations and conclusions. It is, for instance, fascinating to watch her work with national conceptions of self-understanding. Focusing on the different ways in which England and Germany constructed each other, she maintains that "Germany justified the invasion of Belgium by invoking a fear of shrinking boundaries; England justified its response to that invasion by invoking a horror of penetrated borders." In Britain, "the penetration of national boundary was articulated as rape" while in Germany it was expressed as a "fear of encirclement." Explaining that "claustrophobia" was "the motivating German paranoia and penetration the motivating Allied one," Booth then connects this rhetorical analysis with a discussion of the "differing ways in which England and Germany designed trench architecture." In both instances, she reflects on the "kinds of imaginative constructs" each country needed to affirm. Booth's real strength, though, lies in her ability to unpack the rhetorical strategies used by novelists, military strategists, and architects alike. All kinds of written documents are examined for the unconscious (cultural) investments contained in their language. Reading an article by an architect, for instance, she convincingly argues that "this writer exchanges...

pdf

Share