"[On war as ironic]: It's ironic because everybody believes that life is pleasurable, and they should. They have a right to believe that, especially if they're brought up under a Constitution that talks about the pursuit of happiness. To have public life shot through with that kind of optimism and complacency is the grounds for horrible, instructive irony when those generalities prove not true. War tends to prove them not true. War is about survival and it's about mass killing and it's about killing or being killed — that is, in the infantry — and it is extremely unpleasant. One realizes that a terrible mistake has been made somewhere, either by the optimistic eighteenth century or by mechanistic twentieth century. The two don't fit together somehow, and that creates, obviously, irony."
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Literary criticsHistorians from the United StatesCritics from the United StatesPeople from Los AngelesUniversity of Pennsylvania faculty
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Paul Fussell
Paul Fussell (22 March 1924 - 23 May 2012) was an American cultural and literary historian, professor emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania, and author of books on eighteenth-century English literature, World War I, World War II, and social class.
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