Watching War - by Jan Mieszkowski (Hardcover)

About the Book

Watching War explores what it means to be a spectator to battles in an era in which the boundaries between witnessing, representing, and perpetrating violence have become profoundly blurred.

Book Synopsis

Watching War explores what it means to be a spectator to battles in an era in which the boundaries between witnessing, representing, and perpetrating violence have become profoundly blurred.

Review Quotes

"[Watching War seeks to theorize in a broad way the nature of modern war spectatorship rather than focusing specifically on Romantic literature . . . What Mieszkowski adds is a capacity to see the Romantic-era eyewitness in literary terms, particularly as he comes to focus on novelists who see in the imagination the best way to make sense of war (26)."--Neil Ramsey "European Romantic Review"

"Jan Mieszkowski's Watching War makes a compelling case for understanding questions about war spectatorship in a broader historical context, one that extends back to a historical period that predates the era of technological reproduction . . . The monograph's interdisciplinarity is one of its strengths. While theoretical, it is not overly so--it makes judicious use of a number of philosophers and theorists to underscore the continuity of the discussions about representability that have marked war depictions over the last 150 years. The author is able to shift deftly between fictional and philosophical texts and analyses literature and visual images with the same level of rigorous attention."--Michael D. Richardson "Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies"

"Mieszkowski describes how the modern spectacle of war and the storytelling that surrounds it and contributes to its experience create distance and confusion, if not the impossibility of grasping the reality of its significance and lived experience . . . The questions he engages are of interest to many . . . Recommended."--J. K. Chakars "CHOICE"

"The book's greatest value for the field of media ethics is in introducing a critical perspective on not only how writers, photographers, painters, and others represent war but also about the assumptions average citizens make as onlookers to war."--Susan Keith "Journal of Mass Media Ethics"

"Urgent, difficult, and often painful questions drive this captivating book: the inextricable link between waging and representing war, between witnessing and perpetrating atrocity, and between the various logics that organize, mediate, disseminate, and legitimate the militarization of the world. We ignore such questions at our own peril."--Rebecca Comay "University of Toronto"

"With consistent intelligence and a flair for newly formulating the paradoxes at the heart of its subject, Watching War advances a series of stalled debates about total war, representation, and agency. Wars become total, it argues, when they are too engulfing to be seen whole and must be imagined as total. Mieszkowski's book is a rigorous and original contribution to one of the liveliest areas of humanities scholarship today."--Paul K. Saint-Amour "University of Pennsylvania"

About the Author

Jan Mieszkowski is Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College. His first book, Labors of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser was published in 2006.