The War Complex: World War II in Our Time

by Marianna Torgovnick

Overview

Marianna Torgovnick here argues that we have lived, since the end of World War II, under the power of a war complex—a set of repressed ideas and impulses that stems from our unresolved attitudes toward the technological acceleration of mass death. This complex has led to gaps and hesitations in public discourse about atrocities committed during the war itself. And it remains an enduring wartime consciousness, one most recently animated on September 11.
     Showing how different events from World War II became prominent in American cultural memory while others went forgotten or remain hidden in plain sight, The War Complex moves deftly from war films and historical works to television specials and popular magazines to define the image and influence of World War II in our time. Thinking anew about how we account for war to each other and ourselves, Torgovnick ultimately, and movingly, shows how these anxieties and fears have prepared us to think about September 11 and our current war in Iraq.
     “This book is wide-ranging, moving beyond American matters and authors. As a postmodernist critical approach, it succeeds in contextualizing American reactions to World War II by going deeper than national boundaries and impersonal narration.”—Eric Solomon, American Literature

     “A provoking and ethical book. . . . In an age when information is ephemeral, any book which recovers forgotten history is laudable.”—James Ervin, Rain Taxi

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226808567
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	06/01/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Marianna Torgovnick is professor of English at Duke University and director of Duke’s New York Program in Arts and Media. She is the author of numerous works, including Primitive Passions: Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy, Gone Primitive: Modern Intellects, Savage Lives, and Crossing Ocean Parkway, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Prologue: After 9/11
Introduction: Hiding in Plain Sight
1. D-Day
2. Eichmann's Ghost
3. Citizens of the Holocaust: The Vernacular of Growing Up after World War II
4. Unexploded Bombs
5. "They are ever returning to us, the dead": The Novels of W. G. Sebald
Conclusion: Toward an Ethics of Identification
Afterword
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

William Faulkner once said, "The past is never over. It's never even really the past." It's certainly true that wars are never really past; their effects stay with us for years after the shooting stops. Thirty years ago, Paul Fussell famously explored the lasting impact of World War I on 20th-century culture in The Great War and Modern Memory, and now Torgovnick (Crossing Ocean Parkway) has brilliantly captured the impact of the World War II on American sensibilities in the intervening years. This small book is a veritable tour de force of interpretation and synthesis of the cultural, literary, and historical repercussions produced by the second major worldwide cataclysm. Torgovnick delves into how the numerous events in the war-such as D-day, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust-have been seared into the collective memories of multiple generations of Americans since 1945. An exceptional book that every library should own.-Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"An audaciously wide-ranging cultural critique of how World War II has entered contemporary modern memory and consciousness. This is an important and illuminating book that will have a large and receptive audience."

James E. Young

"A beautifully written meditation, at once wide ranging and intensely focused by the master thesis that at the heart of modernity lies the consciousness of war and the spectacle-horrifying and yet strangely narcotic-of mass death."

Stanley Fish

"A provoking and ethical book. . . . In an age when information is ephemeral, any book which recovers forgotten history is laudable."

Rain Taxi - James Ervin

"This book is wide-ranging, moving beyond American matters and authors. As a postmodernist critical approach, it succeeds in contextualizing American reactions to World War II by going deeper than national boundaries and impersonal narration."

Eric Solomonn Literature

"Through personal rumination and inventive analysis, Torgovnick offers an inspiring model for a new way to write cultural history. Her lucid, companionable voice leads us through nightmare with exemplary generosity and intelligence."

Wayne Koestenbaum

"Torgovnick has begun to do for the Second World War what for some years now thoughtful scholars and critics have done for the Civil War: to explore how our patriotism can survive if we acknowledge terrible truths. Her promising ethical solution transcends identity politics in a way that should open important further discussion."

Jonathan Arac

"Torgovnick serves as a kind of quirky and compelling guide on a walking tour of popular memory, drawing us in with her enthusiasm for her subject and provoking us to notice—and to think deeply about—the cultural and literary landscape of the post-World War II era."

The Historian - Tami Davis Biddle

"Togovnick's book should find a wide readership among scholars of international relations who hope to understand how cultural reporesentations can shape attitudes towards past and future conflicts."

International History Review - Ronald J. Granieri

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2006

CHOICE

"Marianna Torgovnick is one of our most brilliant and probing cultural critics."

Joyce Carol Oates

"This book is wide-ranging, moving beyond American matters and authors. As a postmodernist critical approach, it succeeds in contextualizing American reactions to World War II by going deeper than national boundaries and impersonal narration."

American Literature - Eric Solomon