Violence without God : the rhetorical despair of twentieth-century writers / Joyce Wexler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wexler, Joyce Piell, 1947- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Violence in literature.

Atrocities in literature.

Despair in literature.

Rhetoric and psychology.

Authors--20th century--Psychology.

Authors.

Authors--21st century--Psychology.

Literature, Modern--20th century--History and criticism.

Literature, Modern.

Literature, Modern--21st century--History and criticism.

Authors--Psychology.

Psychology.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

ix, 204 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc., 2017.

Summary:

" As twentieth-century writers confronted the political violence of their time, they were overcome by rhetorical despair. Unspeakable acts left writers speechless. They knew that the atrocities of the century had to be recorded, but how? A dead body does not explain itself, and the narrative of the suicide bomber is not the story of the child killed in the blast. In the past, communal beliefs had justified or condemned the most horrific acts, but the late nineteenth-century crisis of belief made it more difficult to come to terms with the meaning of violence. In this major new study, Joyce Wexler argues that this situation produced an aesthetic dilemma that writers solved by inventing new forms. Although Symbolism, Expressionism, Modernism, Magic Realism, and Postmodernism have been criticized for turning away from public events, these forms allowed writers to represent violence without imposing a specific meaning on events or claiming to explain them. Wexler's investigation of the way we think and write about violence takes her across national and period boundaries and into the work of some of the greatest writers of the century, among them Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Alfred Döblin, Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, and W. G. Sebald. "-- Provided by publisher.

"Third year undergraduates and above studying twentieth-century literature, modernism, comparative literature, literature and culture"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note:

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Problem

1. Symbolism in a Secular Age

2. T. S. Eliot's Expressionist Angst

3. D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love and Men at War

4. Ulysses, the Mythical Method, and Magic Realism

5. The German Route from Ulysses to Magic Realism

6. How to Write about the Holocaust

Epilogue: The End of the Secular Age

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Wexler, Joyce Piell, 1947- author. Violence without God

ISBN:

9781501325298

1501325299

9781501325281

1501325280

OCLC:

966895395