Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature

by Roy Scranton

 
Since World War II, the story of the trauma hero—the noble white man psychologically wounded by his encounter with violence—has become omnipresent in America’s narratives of war, an imaginary solution to the contradictions of American political hegemony. In Total Mobilization , Roy Scranton cuts through the fog of trauma that obscures World War II, uncovering a lost history and reframing the way we talk about war today.
 
Considering often overlooked works by James Jones, Wallace Stevens, Martha Gellhorn, and others, alongside cartoons and films, Scranton investigates the role of the hero in industrial wartime, showing how such writers struggled to make sense of problems that continue to plague us the limits of American power, the dangers of political polarization, and the conflicts between nationalism and liberalism. By turning our attention to the ways we make war meaningful—and by excavating the politics implicit within the myth of the traumatized hero— Total Mobilization revises the way we understand not only World War II, but all of postwar American culture.
 
 

Genres: War

288 pages, Paperback

Published July 30, 2019

About the author

Roy Scranton is the author of Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress (Stanford University Press, 2025), I ♥ Oklahoma! (Soho Press, 2019), Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2019), We’re Doomed. Now What? (Soho Press, 2018), War Porn (Soho Press, 2016), and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights, 2015). He has written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Nation, the New Republic, The Baffler, Yale Review, Emergence, Boston Review, and elsewhere, and he co-edited What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate & Reinvent Our Future (Unnamed Press, 2017) and Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (Da Capo, 2013).

His essay “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University, and he has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Reviews

[David Eisler · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thought-provoking, deep, and important work of literary criticism that calls into question the standard interpretation of World War II in American literature. This book is sure to generate a new conversation about Americans' understanding and meaning-making of the war.

[Jacob Moose]

“Williams might have said "no ideas but in things," but in the postwar world, even writing about things meant participating in the heroic ideals of a militarized America. How an American poet might carry on the lyric's dialectic of individual identity and collective discourse in this almost totalitarian atmosphere was a serious problem for anyone beginning to write in the late 1940s and early 1950s.” (148)