TALK: Douhet and Mrs. Dalloway: Rethinking Totality in the War Metropolis
Paul Saint-Amour (Associate Prof. of English, Pomona College)
Friday, November 19 / 3:00 PM / South Hall 2617, 2nd floor / Free
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During the 1920’s, a number of air power theorists argued that the next war would be won by the side that could most effectively use aerial bombing and gas attacks against its adversary's cities and citizens. Giulio Douhet and other self-styled "prophets" of air power held that the distinction between combatants and non-combatants was a thing of the past, and the failure of the major powers to sign the 1923 Hague Convention outlawing the bombing of non-military targets seemed to support their view. This talk, part of a work in progress entitled: Archive, Bomb, Camera: Modernism in the Shadow of Total War, reads that emerging military practice as an intimate structuring force in several 1920s modernist city novels, particularly Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Paradoxically, Douhet's view that every worker, commodity and space is interimplicated in the war economy functions as both an object of protest and a formal axiom in Woolf's novel and its genre-mates, the great modernist city epics of Joyce, Döblin, Svevo and others.

Presented by the IHC Modernist Studies Research Focus Group

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