Peace, War, and Critique

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.15608

Keywords:

peace, war, America

Abstract

This article offers a brief exploration of the contradictory meanings of "war" and "peace", beginning with the ways in which, paradoxically, one term is supposed to engender its opposite. Inspired by sources as diverse as James Madison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and Judith Butler, the author tries to imagine what it would take to break the war-and-peace continuum.

Author Biography

Giorgio Mariani, The "Sapienza" University of Rome, Italy

Giorgio Mariani is a Professor of American Literature at the “Sapienza” University of Rome, Faculty of Letters and Philosophy. He has served as President of the International American Studies Association (IASA), from 2011 to 2015. His work has concentrated on nineteenth-century American writers (Emerson, Melville, Stephen Crane, and others); on contemporary American Indian literature; on literary theory; on the literary and cinematic representation of war. He has published, edited, and co-edited several volumes, listed below.  His essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, including American Literary History, Studies in American Fiction, Fictions, RIAS, RSA Journal, Stephen Crane Studies. Nuovo Corrente, Zapruder, Leviathan, Letterature d'America, A.I.O.N., Acoma, Studi Americani. With Donatella Izzo he edits the American Studies series of the Sapienza UP, and with Donatella Izzo and Mauro Pala he edits the series "Le Balene" published by La Scuola di Pitagora. He is co-editor-in-chief with (Donatella Izzo and Stefano Rosso) of  Acoma. Rivista internazionale di studi nord-americani. His books published in English include: Waging War on War. Peacefighting in American Literature (2015), Post-tribal Epics: The Native American Novel between Tradition and Modernity (1996), Spectacular Narratives: Representations of Class and War in Stephen Crane and the American 1890s (1992).

References

Bourrienne, Louis Antoine Fauvelet de. Mémoires de M. de Bourrienne, Ministre d’État: Sur Napoléon, le Directoire, le Consulat, l’Empire et la Restauration. Vol. 4, 1829. Google Books, https://books.google.it/books?id=4ro8AAAAYAAJ. Accessed 19 Apr. 2023.

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. University of California Press, 1945.

Butler, Judith. The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. Verso, 2021.

Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Princeton University Press, 1984.

Eisenhower, Dwight D. “The Chance for Peace.” The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/231643. Accessed 19 Apr. 2023.

Eisenhower, Dwight D. Military-Industrial Complex Speech. Lillian Goldman Law Library, 1961, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp. Accessed 19 Apr. 2023.

Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended.” Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Translated by David Macey. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, Picador, 2003.

James, William. “The Moral Equivalent of War.” Writings, 1902–1910. Edited by Bruce Kuklick, Library of America, 1987, pp. 1281–1293.

Madison, James. James Madison’s “Advice to My Country.” Edited by David B. Mattern, University Press of Virginia, 1997.

Madison, James. The Writings of James Madison. Edited by Gaillard Hunt, vol. 3, Putnam’s, 1902.

Mansfield, Nick. Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou. Palgrave, 2008.

Mariani, Giorgio. Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature. University of Illinois Press, 2015.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. Penguin, 1986.

“Si vis pacem, para bellum.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_vis_pacem,_para_bellum#Si_vis_pacem_para_pacem. Accessed 19 Apr. 2023.

Wegner, Philip E. Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative. Northwestern University Press, 2014.

Downloads

Published

2023-12-29

How to Cite

Mariani, G. (2023). Peace, War, and Critique. Review of International American Studies, 16(2), 53–66. https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.15608

Issue

Vol. 16 No. 2 (2023): Life Matters: The Human Condition in the Age of Pandemics—RIAS Vol. 16, Fall–Winter (2/2023)

Section

FEATURES

License

The Copyright Holder of the submitted text is the Author. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the RIAS websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Any commercial use requires separate written agreement with the Author and a proper credit line indicating the source of the original publication in RIAS.

  1. License

The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY 4.0 license.

  1. Author’s Warranties

The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.

If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution - By the same conditions 4.0 International".

ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).

  1. User Rights

Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

  1. Co-Authorship

If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.

I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.