Chapter 8 - War and Language

Summary

War and language have a symbiotic relationship. On the one hand, wars are carried on and remembered through a proliferation of linguistic discourse. On the other, language is often a site of violent action and the battlefield of fierce struggles for power. This chapter explores the symbiosis between war and language at two different levels. First, it delves into the language of war as explored by modern and contemporary writers and thinkers. Second, it analyzes the language on war by suggesting the most common family resemblances of war writing (e.g., the preponderance of the adynaton, the absurd, the sublime, metaliterature and self-referentiality, the embedding of reflections on war, the presence of an authorial ethical stand, the importance of the senses, factuality), as well as by studying three of its main parameters. At the end, the chapter argues that the writing on war openly addresses epistemological, ontological, and ethical issues that most, if not all, literary writing has to face sooner or later, and it concludes that since it self-consciously brings out essential aspects of any literary artifact, war writing constitutes an apotheosis of literature itself.