Notice of field related talk – Friday Forum:

Friday, March 2, 2012 

2:00PM, Room 4406

Paul K. Saint-Amour

University of Pennsylvania

On the Partiality of Total War: From Charlton to Joyce

An RAF officer traveling to Iraq in late 1922 takes Joyce’s Ulysses along to read, describing the novel as an “official handbook” to the region. Later, that same officer protests the RAF’s bombing of Iraqi civilians—part of its experiment in “imperial air control”—and resigns his post, only to become a writer of imperial adventure novels and a prophet of the necessary killing of civilians in the next world war. This talk trails Air Commodore L.E.O. Charlton through a series of disparate spaces and genres in order to trace how the emergent concept of “total war” effaced the connections between them—between imperial romance and the modernist day-book, interwar British mandates and the metropole, and narratives of threat and reassurance in military spectacle.