Literary Representations of Violence

In this article, I show how Mexican artists Edgar Clément and Tony Sandoval work through representations of mutable, gendered bodies to explore the manifestations of neoliberalism and the kinds of violence that are encouraged or facilitated within that socioeconomic framework. More specifically, I argue that both artists make use of a wide range of monsters and monstrous characters to revelatory effect as they employ a series of specifically Mexican monsters to relate multifaceted stories of violence on a personal and systemic level. This is particularly true regarding their construction and positioning of la Malinche or malinchista characters as the monstrous/revelatory centers of each text. Lastly, I argue that the use of an open medium such as comics/graphic narrative provides both artists with an ideal platform to relate issues of drug-related violence and trauma for two reasons: first, it interrogates what Oswaldo Zavala has called the critical limits of narconarrative, as both texts refuse to present drug or other violence as disconnected from the nation and the state. Secondly, this interrogative power is due in part to the way in which the Mexican reading public has historically been trained to consume and interact with graphic narrative.

Boldly taking the terms of the debate from the dialectic tussle between fact and fiction to an inspired verisimilitude, "The Night of Broken Glass" stands as powerful testimony to the wreckage of generations of ordinary, innocent lives crushed under the geopolitics of national and religious war.

Blood Meridian is celebrated by various critics as a twentieth century masterpiece. It is also among the most violent books ever published. This article considers the book as a provocation to the reader, a call to reassess one's responses and boundaries with regards to the aesthetics of violence. The novel, in this reading, measures its audience's sensibilities through what is looked at, and what is looked away from. McCarthy is not suggesting that all humans are essentially violent, I argue here, but rather that all humans have a fascination with violence, and that this fascination, this compulsion to ritualise and aestheticise violence ought to be investigated.

The article deals with the theme of violence in Ancient Greek novels such as Chariton’s Chaireas and Callirhoe, Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaka, Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon and Heliodoros’ Aithiopika. The presence of acts of violence, homicide and rape is investigated through lexical research. Conclusions are drawn concerning the occurrence, dynamics and motivations for such forms of violence which vary considerably since violence is an expression of different fictional worlds.

This paper examines why and how Algerian Arabic novelist Bashīr Muftī inscribes ‘violence’ in his novel Ashbāḥ al-madīnah al-maqtūlah (The Ghosts of the Murdered City) (2012). The novel deals with one of the most traumatic episodes in Algerian contemporary history, namely the events of the 1990s.
Commonly referred to as the Black Decade, the period was marked by the rise of religious fundamentalism, and by an increase of diverse forms of violence. The paper argues that Muftī’s text counters official discourse in its attempt to speak the unspeakable, and offers multivocal narrative as a means to resist oblivion in the very particular political and historical context of the Post-Civil War era. The paper also contends that telling the story of this tragic and traumatic collective experience is an important and indispensable aspect if the trauma is to be worked through.

Even though violence in Latin America varies a lot between and within countries, Colombia has long been seen as the epicentre of an intense kind of Latin American violence that appears fundamentally different from everyday antagonism in what is known as the West, the First World, or the Global North. Colombia has been paralysed for half a century by an undeclared civil war between government and anti-government forces, fought first against the backdrop of the Cold War, and then against the United States-led war on drugs. This article will discuss the Colombian writer Evelio Rosero, who challenges the tendency to look to his country for an exceptional Colombian violence. His short story “Brides by Night” (1998) and novel The Armies (2007) step back from the context of the Colombian conflicts to draw attention to gender violence. This article argues that violence against women is a universal concern, and that the way it is represented by Rosero contests narratives that confine violence to Colombia as a place of exception. Using the psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity developed by Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and others, this article discusses how a similar libidinal investment in women and Colombians as Other confines both a gender demographic and a racial demographic to a similarly precarious position. In a globalising world, it is not only counterintuitive, but unethical to imagine and, in so doing, reinforce patterns of marginalisation and violence. A collective effort to traverse the fantasy of otherness in different art forms and media is crucial.

The aesthetic nature of witness-narratives raises theoretical concern insofar as this particular form of storytelling blends different genres and crosses the boundaries of literary, historical, and juridical rhetoric. From the point of view of literary theory, witness-narratives confront critics and theorists with remarkable challenges as to their definition and interpretation. Nonetheless, witness-narratives have become a solid reality in Western literature over the twentieth century, mostly because of the world wars that involved millions of individuals who found in writing a way to deal with their experiences in order to understand them and to control their long-term effects. This volume considers witness-narratives in its aesthetic nature of hybrid mode of storytelling in which historical narration and mythopoeic storytelling combine together. German war accounts of the Russian Campaign (1941-1944) provide an example of a historical and autobiographical narrative, where the mythical-romantic mode (visionary and symbolic) is blended with the historic-realistic mode (descriptive and causal). On the one hand, the witnesses recount past historical events; on the other, they re-functionalize archetypes, symbols, literary genres and mythologies for the benefit of present communities. Through witness-narratives we apprehend not only how and why we have become what we are, but also the deepest roots of our opinions and beliefs.

La memorialistica si è affermata nel corso dell’ultimo secolo come un fenomeno letterario, soprattutto in seguito alle guerre mondiali, che hanno coinvolto grandi masse di individui. Questo volume rappresenta un tentativo di collocare il modo memorialistico nell’orizzonte della narrativa contemporanea, attraverso una riflessione teorica che compara la teoria letteraria di Northrop Frye con la teoria storico-filosofica del mito, e attraverso lo studio di una specifica tradizione memorialistica: il racconto della campagna di Russia combattuta dall’esercito tedesco tra il 1941 e il 1945. Secondo la tesi di questo studio, nella memorialistica si combinano istanze storiche, antropologiche e ideologiche, dando vita a un modo letterario originale della contemporaneità, che rivela come il nostro rapporto con il modo mitico del raccontare sia rimasto vivo e continui a costituire il principale mezzo della nostra auto-comprensione.

The Chilean author Roberto Bolaño cultivated a contentious (and contradictory) attitude to literature, believing that it conceals the fear and self-interest that coordinates its meaningfulness. For Bolaño, great writers should face the abyss of meaninglessness while standing tall, a directive which prohibits drawing conclusions that might ultimately be elevated to the level of fact. Instead, Bolaño commits to a category of truth that cannot be described by inscribing its contingent effects in his writing through what I will call his ‘antiliterature.’ Acknowledging this inaccessible truth, Bolaño’s writing reveals an aversion to all-encompassing literary forms that can be seen in the same light as Jacques Lacan’s term ‘antiphilosophy,’ describing the French psychoanalyst’s position against philosophy. Just as Lacanian antiphilosophy continues to contribute to twenty-first-century philosophical critiques, Bolaño’s antiliterature renders possible novel literary trajectories. Bolaño’s 2009 novel 2666 exemplifies his antiliterary approach, subverting the literary genre of crime fiction by refusing to supply an object to fulfil the reader’s desire for closure and by universalising guilt.

This paper examines two novels, both published in 2004 and later translated into English: 2666 by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño and Senselessness by Honduran-Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya. Bolaño and Castellanos Moya write death and dying as a global concern and place readers in the global North at the centre of events that happened, or are happening, in the South. This paper argues that 2666 and Senselessness express the human potential in desire for, and to create, excess, universalising guilt against a tendency to contextualise or localise events of mass murder in Central and South America. Both novels represent death and dying while expressing an uncanny excess of life at the level of form and content. Bolaño and Castellanos Moya bombard the reader with the details of crimes and harrowing witness testimonies in their novels, but deny the reader closure or the ability to mourn the dead. Instead, the excess of life traces a void that, according to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and others, is at the centre of the subject of desire. It is at the level of desire that we can locate ourselves in both novels and understand our part in the events of mass murder their writers narrate.

[‘Profeta e satiro. A proposito di Inferno XIX’, Dante Studies 133 (2015): 27-45, translation from the Italian] Starting from textual comparisons between the nineteenth canto of Inferno and the Bible, Rachel Jacoff, Mirko Tavoni and Zygmunt Barański have shown how the canto of the simonists marks the investiture of Dante as prophet. The present study takes the hypothesis that, at the same time and with the same emphasis, it also marks the investiture of Dante as satirist.