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The War Complex: World War II in Our Time | 
| Author: Marianna Torgovnick
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Category: Book
Buy New: $17.00
New (15) Used (7) from $14.47
Rating:  6 reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 240
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.7
ISBN: 0226808564
Dewey Decimal Number: 355
EAN: 9780226808567
ASIN: 0226808564
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Marianna Torgovnick here argues that we have lived, since the end of World War II, under the power of a war complex—a set of repressed ideas and impulses that stems from our unresolved attitudes toward the technological acceleration of mass death. This complex has led to gaps and hesitations in public discourse about atrocities committed during the war itself. And it remains an enduring wartime consciousness, one most recently animated on September 11.
Showing how different events from World War II became prominent in American cultural memory while others went forgotten or remain hidden in plain sight, The War Complex moves deftly from war films and historical works to television specials and popular magazines to define the image and influence of World War II in our time. Thinking anew about how we account for war to each other and ourselves, Torgovnick ultimately, and movingly, shows how these anxieties and fears have prepared us to think about September 11 and our current war in Iraq.
“This book is wide-ranging, moving beyond American matters and authors. As a postmodernist critical approach, it succeeds in contextualizing American reactions to World War II by going deeper than national boundaries and impersonal narration.”—Eric Solomon, American Literature “A provoking and ethical book. . . . In an age when information is ephemeral, any book which recovers forgotten history is laudable.”—James Ervin, Rain Taxi
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 Torgovnick does it again April 23, 2008
Yogastu (New York City)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
As a long-time admirer of Marianna Torgovnick's work, I am very happy with the Duke professor's latest intellectual work. Torgovnick has the gift of exposing how what we assume to be true can manipulate us ("Hidden in Plain Sight").
We all think we know World War II -- the "good" war that has become more important as the U.S, has made some questionable choices internationally over the last few decades. Torgovnick has been digging below the surface for the last few decades now, and her latest attempt just might be her best so far, although her many admirers will, I believe, want more in the future.
Sarah Cole November 12, 2007
Sarah Cole
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a penetrating, important book, simultaneously accessible and learned, about the troubling place of the Second World War in American culture.
elegant and original October 5, 2005
C Smith (New Haven, CT)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
THE WAR COMPLEX is a wonderful book--disturbing and illuminating, historicallly rich and politically timely. It begins with a startling and sweeping observation: the history of the twentieth century is a history of almost continuous war; "modernity" is virtually always "wartime"; and the accelerated violence of World War II, directed against military and civilian populations alike, is the centerpiece of our shared past. To understand the modern mind, then, we have to understand how it has been transformed by exposure to mass killing. We have to remember not only the storming of beaches and the liberation of capitals, but also the concentration camps, the firebombing of homes, the eradication of whole cities by atomic bombs.
One problem, of course, is that we remember World War II too much. It is invoked, for instance, as a justification for more war, as when politicians and media depicted 9/11 as a repetition of Pearl Harbor--at attack on America that demanded an old-fashioned, full-scale military response. Violence, experienced and remembered, begets violence. This is a symptom of what Torgovnick cals "wartime consciousness": overexposed to mass death, we organize the world according to antagonisms. It's always "us against them."
Torgovnick's daring and imaginative undertaking, in THE WAR COMPLEX, is to try to think her way through and out of "wartime consciousness." Some hawks and dullards will complain that the book is too personal, too meditative, that it turns to the imagination and the study of art when war is a matter of politics, when mass death is a matter of statistics. They will miss the point. When wartime is all the time, when our societies and our minds are built to be combat-ready, moving beyond these dominant patterns requires some unorthodox thinking. Therefore THE WAR COMPLEX considers, for example, "the kind of imaginative projections that novels can provide, their opening up of a space based on social realities, but not determined by them." And therefore, in her unconventional book--moving elegantly among the spheres of history and psychology, politics and the arts--Torgovnick adopts a personal, sometimes even confessional mode of writing. It's the opposite of self-indulgence. It's an effort to discover some grounds of "identification," some pattern of human connection beyond wartime.
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