Allegories of violence: Tracing the writing of war in twentieth-century fiction

My dissertation is a formal analysis of contemporary novelistic language as it responds to late twentieth-century definitions of war. The following works will be considered: Paco's Story, Larry Heinemann; Shikasta, Doris Lessing; White Noise, Don DeLillo; Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Acker; Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko. Beginning with Paul Fussell's anthology of the war literature of this century, I argue that the genre of the war novel after 1960 has undergone radical formal changes. Using Fredric Jameson's theories on economy and artistic production I argue that these novelists present us with new ways to understand the concept of war through narrative means. By charting the formal elements inside fictions of war, I argue that the narrative language of the novel after 1960 produces a different response to and representation of war than did the war novels prior to 1960.;By their stylistic choices and experiments in form, each author in my study emphasizes how the narrative forms available for representing war prior to 1960 are foreclosed by changes in the novel and in the way we understand war. Larry Heinemann's Vietnam novel Paco's Story represents a breakdown in both the language available to tell the story of war and the stability of the position of the soldier as an authority on war. Shikasta, Doris Lessing's science fiction novel attempts to give us a viewpoint on war unlimited by national or historical markers. Don Delillo displaces the concept of nuclear apocalypse onto narrative form in his novel White Noise. The close proximity of gender and sexuality to representations of war and economy are reflected in Kathy Acker's novel Empire of the Senseless, and Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead shows us a series of allegorical wars deeply rooted in the concept of capitalist expansion. Rather than producing a universal and historically stable definition of war in late twentieth-century terms, the texts in my study explore, in a variety of ways, how changes in the novel, a form that has always been tied to social and economic movements, shape our understanding of war, and how changes in war in turn shape our understanding of the novel.