Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature

by Giorgio Mariani

Overview

The notion that war plays a fundamental role in the United States' idea of itself obscures the rich—and by no means naïve—seam of anti-war thinking that winds through American culture. Non-violent resistance, far from being a philosophy of passive dreamers, instead embodies Ralph Waldo Emerson's belief that peace "can never be defended, never be executed, by cowards."

Giorgio Mariani rigorously engages with the essential question of what makes a text explicitly anti-war. Ranging from Emerson and Joel Barlow to Maxine Hong Kingston and Tim O'Brien, Waging War on War explores why sustained attempts at identifying the anti-war text's formal and philosophical features seem to always end at an impasse. Mariani moves a step beyond to construct a theoretical model that invites new inquiries into America's nonviolent, nonconformist tradition even as it challenges the ways we study U.S. warmaking and the cultural reactions to it. In the process, he shows how the ideal of nonviolence and a dislike of war have been significant, if nonhegemonic, features of American culture since the nation's early days.

Ambitious and nuanced, Waging War on War at last defines anti-war literature while exploring the genre's role in an assertive peacefighting project that offered—and still offers—alternatives to violence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252039751
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	12/07/2015
Series:	Global Studies of the United States
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Giorgio Mariani is a professor of American literature at the Sapienza University of Rome. He is the author of Spectacular Narratives: Representations of Class and War in Stephen Crane and American Popular Literature of the 1890s.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xix

Part I Theory

1 Anti-War? Notes on a Ghostly Concept 3

2 Ad Bellum Purificandum: Giving Peace a Fighting Chance 31

3 The Rhetorical Equivalent of War: William James, Kenneth Burke, Stephen Crane 57

Part II Readings

4 An American Counter-Epic? War and Peace in Joel Barlow's Columbiad 87

5 "Cain's Ring": Moby-Dick and the Narrative of Sacrifice 106

6 "Curious Anesthetics": Ellen La Motte and the Wounds of the Great War 126

7 Waging War on the Sacred: William Faulkner's A Fable 146

8 War, Fiction, and Truth: Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story" 170

9 Beyond the Semantic Netherworld: Literature and the Iraq War 190

Notes 225

Works Cited 243

Index 261

Editorial Reviews

"Waging War on War is a fascinating, learned, lively, and much-needed study of how different American writers and activists have imagined, defined, and fought for peace, even as they have gone to war or confronted the history of U.S. interventionism." —IMPACT


"Giorgio Mariani's Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature is a theoretically informed, refreshingly innovative perspective on the understudied genre of anti-war literature." —Leviathan: Journal of Melville Studies

 

"A rigorous examination of anti-war literature, and the result of decades of reading, writing and teaching."—Times Literary Supplement

"A timely, insightful, and eloquently argued treatment of the perennial topic of war and peace. One of the most brilliant Americanists from Rome, Mariani keenly examines the history of the Pax Americana through the intricacies of U.S. literature and its ambiguous, often ambivalent, relationship to the perpetual wars indispensable for empire and its hegemony. Mariani reads from the American canon and its critical corpus with lucidity, well-tempered analysis, and theoretical sophistication."—Djelal Kadir, Founding President, International American Studies Association

"The book's greatest strengths (of which there are many) are its contextualization of its multiple strands within a broader framework, and its repeated and concerted efforts to complicate and challenge both received truths and the very point it is putting forward in a dialectical approach that is both elliptical and absorbing."—European Journal of American Studies

"This is a rigorous, knowledgeable and wide-ranging contribution to our understanding of war and anti-war literature as well as to the knotty issues raised by the relations established between these two terms in US fiction."—Op. Cit.

"Giorgio Mariani's Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature is a lucid, comprehensive, and persuasive study of a topic of urgent academic and social concern."—American Literary History

"A rhetorical tour de force reminiscent of Kenneth Burke, Giorgio Mariani's Waging War on War transforms the paradoxical violence of U.S. 'anti-war literature' into an indispensable interpretive frame for reimagining the warmaking nation's literary history from Joel Barlow's Columbiad and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick to Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Helen Benedict's Sand Queen."—Donald E. Pease, author of The New American Exceptionalism

"A significant step in changing how we write about and study U.S. wars, consolidating the increasing interest in intellectually rigorous, theoretically informed variants of peace studies. The close readings are thoughtful and embedded in rich critical and philosophical context."—James Dawes, author of Evil Men

"This is a particularly stimulating group of texts, juxtaposing the canonical with the critically neglected. The writing is of a consistently high standard. The tone is forceful without being pompous, and the overall impression is of an appealing humanity." —Kate McLoughlin, author of Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq

From the Publisher