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WWI & the Language of Modernism Vincent Sherry. The Great War and the Language of Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xiii + 395 pp. $45.00
THE TITLE of Vincent Sherry's very good The Great War and the Language of Modernism suggests the book's relationship to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. As does Fussell, Sherry looks at the effect of the war on language. But there, most of the resemblances stop: Sherry's body of evidence and definition of language are quite different. Fussell limited himself to the British war poets and did not really do the great high moderns (on the other hand, the obvious evidence pointed to those war poets). Sherry's book goes to the canonical high moderns, whose relationship to the Great War has never been completely clear, shrouded as it is by these writers' sparse comments on the war. So there is almost no overlap between the poets these two authors cover. Sherry's book is also more subtle in where it goes for evidence, both in terms of cause and effect. It argues that the high moderns adapted the "sheerly verbal logic" of liberal defenses of the war, turning that to aesthetic ends. And in doing so, Sherry, of course, has taken on something harder than Fussell.
Sherry begins with a juxtaposition, placing the opening events of the Great War against the language "that attempted to rationalize and support them." The Liberal rationalization was insupportable, and became the occasion of purely verbal performances of empty logic: logic that has the sound of sense, but is devoid of content. This Liberal language had aesthetic properties that could be marshaled to give the appearance of logical argumentation-it was not so much content as an almost content-less grammar. The disjunction between sound and sense created a crisis of sorts; Sherry argues that "A deep mainstream of established attitudes-call it public reason, call it civic rationality-was convulsing under the effort to legitimize this war." Sherry records the moment when a way of looking at the world suddenly was found to be inadequate, the moment of the disintegration of liberal rationality. (I need to point out here that Sherry could have done a better job of distinguishing between "Liberal"...