Abstract
Book review of News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936–1945 by Rachel Galvin, Oxford University Press, 2018.
Queneau and other modernist civilian war poets used the distancing strategies of style and rhetoric to negotiate their own distance from the conflict and to address the mediating role of the news, to which Queneau alludes by partly modeling the Exercises on a popular newspaper form: the fait divers. [...]Stein “develops a meta-rhetorical mode that continually underscores the constructed nature or literariness even of a book that pretends to the immediacy of an eyewitness account” (290). News of War brings together several key issues in modernist literature: the questioning of the representative function of language; the problem of how literature might respond to the rise of modern mass media; and the global conflicts that were central to the social, cultural, and geopolitical upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century. Was it one, for instance, equally experienced by the author or authors of The Iliad?