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  • Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form by Paul K. Saint-Amour
  • Adam J. Toth (bio)
Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. By Paul K. Saint-Amour. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xv + 347 pp. Paperback, $29.95.

Prompted by the centennial of the Great War in progress, an increased interest in studies on war and literature has emerged, especially within the context of twentieth-century modernist texts. Among these recent studies, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form by Paul K. Saint-Amour stands out for its refreshing approach to literatures in the twentieth century written in periods of time between wars. Saint-Amour's project, as he puts it in the chapter abstracts appended to the book, "aims to recover certain lost complexities of the interwar period" (317). These complexities are recovered through a constellation of methods, including trauma theory, queer theory, and a theory of weak modernisms. His constellation of methods advance his own theories of futurity and the encyclopedic form, which rethink the modernist work in a broader, more globally applicable way. Saint-Amour employs these methods in his readings of early uses of the term "total war," which include the journalism of Léon Daudet, the memoirs of L.E.O. Charlton, selected works of Virginia Woolf, the apocalyptic science fiction of Cicely Hamilton, Hilary Jenkinson's Manuel of Archive Administration, Diderot and d'Alembert's commentary on their Encyclopédie, James Joyce's Ulysses, Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, and conclude with Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

The first chapter sets an important precedent with regards to Saint-Amour's definition of total war. The author observes in his case study of L.E.O. Charlton that "total war discourse . . . was partial towards Eurocentric imperialist distinctions between center and periphery, peacetime and wartime" (55). The line of logic here matters for two reasons: first, it dismisses war as a simple clash of titans and insists instead that the militarism behind European imperialist projects actually fed directly into understanding what total war is within a European context. Saint-Amour's connection between war and imperialism explains why many modernist literary works, both subsequently treated in Saint-Amour's book [End Page 253] and otherwise, seem to anticipate or foretell World War II as a global catastrophe. Any prophetic quality tethered together with a modernist work is, under Saint-Amour's definition, a consequence of total war's all-encompassing militarism. This reading of total war will become very important in Chapter 2, when Saint-Amour discusses the pins-and-needles state of Virginia Woolf's works. The constant state of anxiety over war in Woolf, the author argues, works "[a]gainst the claim that instincts, traditions, and tutelage combine[d] to make male militarism unalterable" by asking the reader "to think in parallel about the malleability of women's maternal instincts" (127). Deferring to Lee Edelman and Leo Bersani's theorization of the death drive through a queer lens to reject reproductive futurism, Saint-Amour shows how the interwar period fostered a feminist approach to war that disavowed any desire to have children because of the traumatic events of the Great War in the past and the anxiety of a war yet to come.

The second reason Saint-Amour's line of logic matters has much to do with how Saint-Amour's theory attempts to overcome Eurocentric thought. For, as Saint-Amour observes in his reading of Diderot, "Eurocentric paradigms that imagine a singular modernity are incommensurate with the diverse and unpredictable forms sociocultural organization that have arisen in Latin American, Africa, South and East Asia, and other postcolonial spaces" (213). The encyclopedic form, Saint-Amour argues, works toward breaking away from these paradigms by distancing the modernist novel from the term "epic." However, Saint-Amour confines his application of the encyclopedic form not only to Europe, but also to Anglophone literary works. His reading of Dublin as a colonial point within Joyce's Ulysses is as close as he gets to his seemingly Euro-decentralizing method of modernisms. He offers a footnoted list of possible non-Anglophonic works by Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, Alfred Döblin...

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