Session 4(b): Violence, Representation and Literature
Session 4B: Violence, Representation and Literature
Chair: Jo Ellen Fair
Physical, Psychological and Institutional Violence in Ken Loach’s Ladybird, Ladybird
Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy
University of Zaragoza, Spain
No abstract is available.
“The surest way to charme a womans tongue is break her neck”: Language, Violence and Representation in A Yorkshire Tragedy
Juliet Wightman
Department of English Studies University of Stirling, Scotland
Dramatic texts, as examples of the way in which a culture represents itself to itself, provide an important point of convergence for the discourses in which and through which violence is understood. The Renaissance theatre was intimately involved with the processes of selecting, obscuring, contesting and prioritising the meanings of violence, and indeed, the way in which these processes were themselves dramatised. Representations are never simply neutral reflections, but are rather active and politically motivated events, replete with their own violence.
In this paper I explore the treatment of domestic violence in A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608). Based upon the pamphlet Two Most Unnatural and Bloodie Murthers (1605), an account of Mr Calverly’s abuse of his wife and murder of his children, the play is one of a number of domestic tragedies popular at the turn of the seventeenth century, which dramatised sensational accounts of actual violence in the home. The theatre became a space in which the ideology of domestic patriarchy, the expectations of marriage and family life that were propagated by the Church and in the widely distributed conduct literature of the period, were challenged.
Focusing specifically on the character of Mrs Calverly, I argue that she is not only the victim of physical violence but of a violence effected in and through the structures of language. Because assumptions about gender difference are encoded within language, producing a female subject position largely shaped by patriarchal imperatives, the female experience of violence is implicitly and actively repressed through the signifying process. Conduct literature of the period, written primarily by men for a male readership, was instrumental to the prescription and dissemination of expectations of female behaviour. This discourse, although about women, was designed to exclude their participation in the formulation of its meanings. Mrs Calverly’s verbal response to the violence she suffers at the hands of her husband is restricted by the terminology available to her. In order to articulate her experience of violence, she must speak in a language that is not her own: she speaks a patriarchally ordained discourse of wifely compliance that bears no real correlation to her lived experiences. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that it is language which enables violence to assume a cultural currency, and to become something communicable. It is through language that meanings are ascribed to violent acts, but a violent act, like a linguistic signifier, does not have an innate and fixed correspondence with the meaning it assumes. Here, I historicise this process and show that Mrs Calverly was not only subject to physical violence, but also subject to, and a subject of, the language in which she must represent herself and this violence.
Violence and Perversion in Machine Culture: J. G. Ballard’s Fictional Works
Eunju Hwang
Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex
Mark Seltzer says, in Serial Killers, that serial killing is inseparable from the problem of the body in machine culture. In the same context, I will demonstrate that post-modern humans’ violence and perversion are caused by machine culture and technological landscape, giving examples of J. G. Ballard’s novels such as Crash, High-Rise, Running Wild, Cocaine Night, and Super-Cannes. I will show how modern days’ crimes are different from the classical concept of crimes through Ballard’s novels since these crimes are not done by hatred or necessity. Characters in Crash want to die in order to pursuit sexual pleasure and residents in High-Rise and Running Wild commit murders because they are tired of the luxurious environment where everything they need is at hand. In Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, people ‘enjoy’ being involved with murder, rape, paedophile sex and robbery because they merely want to feel strong sensations. However, I am far from criticising immorality in Ballard’s novels. Instead, I will show the positive role of violence and perversion in these novels providing the way of understanding violence in contemporary society.
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