| My dissertation develops an approach I call "military reading" that adapts concepts from the military sphere, such as strategy or tactics, and demonstrates their operations within literary texts. The Introduction situates my primary texts within a narrative of modern American literature and culture, which is developed in four subsequent sections. The first three are single-author case studies that showcase the advantages of military reading through treatments of the work of Henry Adams, Dashiell Hammett, and William Burroughs. Each study treats its body of work by articulating it with selected martial categories, reading Adams through strategy, Hammett through tactics, and Burroughs through weaponry. Each martial category is chosen because it provides insight into the historical situation within which each author wrote: strategy into Adams's post-Civil War moment of American economic and geopolitical expansion; tactics into Hammett's antagonistic milieu of the interwar period; and weaponry into Burroughs's Cold War epoch. Locating each martial concept historically provides a way of seeing differently how these writers are situated within, and respond to, their historical conjunctures. Text and context are mediated by way of military categories. Following these case studies, the dissertation's fourth part addresses the mode of military reading itself, by elaborating the historical preconditions for its emergence, and placing it within postwar debates both in literary studies around reading practices, and in the culture at large about war itself. Instead of aiming to articulate a direct stance in opposition to "war," military reading asks: What sorts of theoretical and historical work do military modes of thinking do? What sorts of deep social needs do they meet? In short: What do we want out of war? The project of military reading is animated by an attempt to narrate a history of the articulation of this question. |
