The general theatre of death: Modern fatality and modernist form

The General Theatre of Death considers the vicissitudes of narrative and visual authority in times of war, focusing on the pressures that the unprecedented violence of the Second World War put on modern American literary, poetic, and photographic forms. This study focuses on the responses---literary and official both---to the American embrace of the tactics and techniques of total war. The substance of the dissertation is devoted to the analysis of the reports of the 1945 United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), and to four exemplary figures who were bound to the Survey's project: the ethnographer Alfred Metraux, the poet W. H. Auden, the photographer Joe O'Donnell and the filmmaker Akira Iwasaki.;The USSBS was a presidential commission authorized by FDR in 1945, and intended to assess the efficacy of the Allied bombing campaign in general, and to refine the techniques of targeting civilians as a mode producing fear and undermining enemy morale. The first chapter offers an extended analysis of the language and logics of the Survey and how it tends to deflect the death it seems to tally and report on. In the second chapter the wartime work of Alfred Metraux, who served on the Survey, is read as a report on what Walter Benjamin called the remains or refuse of history. The third chapter considers the work of the poet W. H. Auden, who spent several months surveying the ruins of Darmstadt and interviewing Germans. This chapter reads the changes of form in his postwar poems, and argues that the retreat of political certainties in the poems is not, as most of the secondary literature suggests, a retreat from politics but must be read instead as a way of refusing loyalty to orthodoxies or abstractions over attention to the world-as-it-is. In the fourth chapter the analysis moves to the Pacific Theater and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This chapter offers a reading of how the photographer Joe O'Donnell and the filmmaker Akira Iwasaki enlist their media against instrumentality, and it considers what kind of images might ask us to be more answerable for, and to, death.