War and Words: Broken Writing and Modest Inflections of Brutality

Abstract : From Henry James to Paul Celan Recent years have seen a spectacular and largely consensual historical turn in the study of modernism. Books on the cultural and political context out of which modernists writers wrote are now legion. For many, this has been experienced with a sigh of relief and a sense that the imperative of theory ─ the ``linguistic turn'' ─ epitomised in a dogmatic misreading of the Derridean axiom, il n'y a pas de hors-texte, has been lifted. Which implies that literary schola...