The Martial Imagination: World War II and American Culture

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My thinking about the particular challenges and opportunities attending second book projects in literary studies today inevitably steers its way to the broader question of the future status of the book itself in the profession. It is, after all, hard not to feel that we are working at the end of a genre, one whose imminent technological and economic obsolescence easily gives rise to a series of questions about its intellectual vitality. We might see an implicit registration of the inefficiency of the book form in our pedagogical practices; at least in my experience, graduate seminars far more routinely take up articles and book chapters than whole monographs. Nor, given the current sales figures, does one get the impression that scholars are themselves especially eager to take these works on as wholes outside of the classroom. At this point, only the most successful books claim greater scholarly visibility than well-placed articles. Our books have assumed the feel of professional markers, necessary for claiming and justifying academic status, but no longer central, at least in their form as books, to the development of the scholarly fields to which we offer them. And whether or not the book remains for us a robust scholarly form is itself somewhat beside the point. The systems of digital distribution on which intellectual life will, no doubt, increasingly depend are hardly hospitable to units comprising so many as 100,000 words.

Even if it is true that the book’s days as the default form for our most ambitious work will soon pass, however, we continue to write them, and their form continues to influence how we conduct our research and present it. And for this reason, it may well be worth pausing to say what the book form has meant for our work and what it will mean for us to operate without it. I hope this description of my current book project will cast some light on these issues.

This project, tentatively entitled “Idle Violence: World War II, American Liberalism, and the Genealogy of Postmodernism,” took life as part of a larger project devoted to assessing the role of realism in American aesthetic and intellectual life from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1960s. I started with little more than a curiosity about what World War II might have had to do with the rise of the common mid-century notion that the novel had run its course. “It is impossible to talk about the novel nowadays,” famously begins Lionel Trilling’s “Art and Fortune” (1948), “without having in our minds the question of whether or not the novel is still a living form” (255). The novel Trilling had in mind here was conspicuously a realist enterprise; it seems to have survived modernism more effectively than it survived World War II. I thought an examination of the famously scare-quoted “realist” World War II combat novel might help me understand why.

What I found in these novels surprised me, both from the standpoint of realism as an aesthetic enterprise and from the perspective of realism as ideological formation. My efforts to account for their interest quickly pushed my investigation of World War II combat novels into a full-blown effort to account for the war’s influence on American aesthetic life from the 1940s through the 1960s. I construe this influence in slightly more technical terms than we may be accustomed to. I am less interested in thinking about the war as the source of various moral problems (the barbarism of poetry after Auschwitz or the absence of problems of the human spirit in the era of the bomb) than as the occasion for a set of fairly recondite reconsiderations of the relationships among force, power, representation, authority, and influence. In effect, I have posited that we might read much of postwar American aesthetic history out of the vigorous reconceptualization of military strategic principles which took place in the Army, the academy, and the popular press from the late 1940s through the Vietnam era. Such an approach lends itself to causal overstatement, I know, but I am...