From Homer to the present, the question has been asked: in what ways do art and war need each other? What can literature capture and what is the goal of writing about war, if, after all, life must ultimately exceed war’s compass? In formulating some of the questions that constitute the literature/war dialectic, this paper will ultimately take us to a surprising figure, H. G. Wells, who was, in his time, one of the loudest voices prophesying war, cataloguing its horrors, and attempting to find a language that might finally end it altogether.
This lecture was held at the 2016 Holberg Symposium: "Art in Life / Life in Art" in honour of Holberg Laureate Stephen Greenblatt.
Biography: Sarah Cole is Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She works primarily on British literary modernism. Select works: At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland(2012) and Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (2003).