105 records matched your query       

Author:

Wexler, Joyce Piell, 1947- author.

Title:

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

Publisher:

Bloomsbury Academican imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.,

Copyright Date:

2017

Description:

ix, 204 pages ; 23 cm

Subject:

Violence in literature.
Atrocities in literature.
Despair in literature.
Rhetoric and psychology.
Authors--20th century--Psychology.
Authors--21st century--Psychology.
Literature, Modern--20th century--History and criticism.
Literature, Modern--21st century--History and criticism.
LITERARY CRITICISM / General.
LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory.
Atrocities in literature.
Authors--Psychology.
Despair in literature.
Literature, Modern.
Rhetoric and psychology.
Violence in literature.
1900-2099
Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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.

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 Do˜blin, Gu˜nter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 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.

ISBN:

1501325280
9781501325281
1501325299
9781501325298

OCLC:

(OCoLC)966895395

LCCN:

2016020328

Locations:

USUX851 -- Iowa State University - Parks Library (Ames)

OVUX522 -- University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa City)