Tracing the Terror of Global Wars: Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon, and Hari Kunzru

Focusing on the novels that respond to the major wars in the 20th century and at the turn of a new century, this dissertation departs radically from previous critical assessments in its use of “technology” and “terror” as two terms of analysis. The dissertation has two aims. First, it endeavors to illustrate the historicized connections among technology, war, and terror. It argues that the capacity of military technology to annihilate time and space during those hundred years opened out the experience of war into the global dimension of daily existence and accordingly, brought about a significant change in the psyche. Second, this dissertation, while exploring the theme of the terror of global wars in the novels, also aims to bring to light the novelists’ critiques of the ways political structures might create and perpetuate war and terror. In pursuing these aims, I will focus on four war novels. They are Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and Hari Kunzru’s Transmission. The four novels cover a series of wars that include the 20th century’s first world war and extend to 9/11 in 2001. In our vague understanding of war as “destruction,” I try to expose the agency of technological specificities and also argue the novelists are keen to these specificities so as to represent the result of terror: a total change of affective structures that stretch deeply into the everyday of the so-called peaceful days, and trauma figures prominently in that change. Terror against the background of war is both technological and psychological. For me, the four novelists attempt to articulate a new reality of war made possible by technology as well as a new affective reality of terror, forged precisely by technological violence.