The War Complex: World War II in Our Time - Softcover

Torgovnick, Marianna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1459627296 ISBN 13: 9781459627291

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant, 2012

Synopsis

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 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.

About this title

Review

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2006

"Marianna Torgovnick is one of our most brilliant and probing cultural critics."--Joyce Carol Oates
"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
"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

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: ReadHowYouWant
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1459627296
• ISBN 13: 9781459627291
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 420