Paul K. Saint-Amour, “Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form” (Oxford UP, 2015)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · May 6, 2015 · 1h 6m

Paul K. Saint-Amour, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is a ruminative thinker and meticulous writer. These traits pay dividends in the surprising insights of his new book, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford University Press, 2015), which reframes total war and literature in the interwar years and in the present moment. The book’s articulation of the partiality of total war, especially its focus on violence committed in the so-called periphery–which denies civilians the protections of officially declared war–is all too familiar in the…