Session 5: Violence in Literature

8th Global Conference

Monday 4th May – Thursday 7th May 2009
Budapest, Hungary

Fictions of Ambivalence: Social Uneasiness and Violence in Crime Fiction
Kim Toft Hansen
Aalborg University, Department of Language and Culture, Denmark

Scandinavian crime fiction is recurrently concerned with the conditions and violent interruptions of democracy and the welfare state. Henning Mankell’s Wallander-series seems predominantly preoccupied by the disturbance of this idyllic scenery by violent acts. Something seems to be afoot and the Scandinavian welfare society seems to be suffering. The upper current in Henning Mankell’s stories show an idyllic manifestation disrupted by an undercurrent of “Swedish uneasiness”. Although democracy and social maintenance seem to be running well, underneath a violent anxiety dislocates the basic preconditions of a democratic welfare system. Different models present various ways of analyzing these currencies of idyllic scenery and violent cruelty, which is very present in Before the Frost, both novel and film – the revolving points in this paper. The undercurrent of unease might be a cultural unconscious of suppressed guilt and anxiety, or it can be dealt with as a general way of delivering social critique through fiction. Nevertheless, the order of society and the democratic scenery is, in the narrative, muddled by religious problems with Christian roots. Correspondingly, this paper reflects upon the violent disruption of democracy and the ambivalent characteristics of both violence, the police officer Wallander and democracy.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Of Boundaries,Transgression And Victimhood: Patterns Of Violence In Arundhati Roy’s The God Of Small Things
Pushpinder Walia
Department of English, BBK Dav College for Women, Amritsar, India

The proposed paper seeks to study the dynamics and motives of violence that emerge in the culture-specific context of gender and caste represented in Arundhati Roy’s Booker winning novel The God of Small Things. “Boundaries blur” states Roy,while describing the monsoon landscape in the very first page of her novel. The paper takes up  “boundaries” as the defining signifier of the text, with their implication of the possibility of transgression and the corollary of punishment ; it studies patterns of violence, individual as well as institutional, as an assertion of power over marginalized entities . When Ammu, a Syrian Christian woman of the elite South Indian community of landowners defies the “Love Laws” by falling in love with Velutha, an “untouchable”,(an  outcaste),punishment for the transgressors is severe and Velutha becomes a victim of police brutality which leads to his death.. The paper explores how violence in the form of punishment is prompted by  “feelings of contempt born out of inchoate , unacknowledged fear—civilisation’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness.”   Indeed, apart from institutional violence,the paper also unfolds the deadly violence unleashed in the domestic sphere of the marital bond. Images of domestic violence abound : whether it is Ammu’s husband who thrashes her in a drunken state so as   to force her to sleep with his boss in order to  save his own  job, or Ammu’s enraged father  who  breaks the bow of his wife’s violin when he  discovers that his wife is a budding musical genius , and goes on to beat her every night  with a brass flower vase. The paper, therefore, shall focus on the social, cultural and political paradigms of power as manifested in The God of Small Things so as to understand how such excesses of violence on unprotected ,marginalized people/communities  are committed by a State, a country or even an individual.

Hearing Silenced Voices: The Body and the Ethics of Reading
Oumar Cherif Diop
University of Kennesaw, Georgia, USA

My presentation will focus on the way the body is used in the representation of violence in African Literature.

Mark Ledbetter posits that the literary text itself as an embodied event reveals an ethic of its making through writing and reading. He articulates his argument around the concept of the “masterplot” that he defines as follows, “The stories of the powerful have become so strongly loud that little short of moments physically and/or emotionally violent and wounding allow silenced victims to speak above the imposing din we might aptly call the ‘master plot’ of most narratives.” Within the text, according to Ledbetter, the disruption of the ‘masterplot’  is another form of violence that subverts the marginalization, the exclusion, the victimization, and the silencing of the weak and the powerless. When we explore within the narrative’s language the violence that is imposed on the body as text, we discover that it disrupts the ‘masterplot’ of the text. Such violence is revealed through examination of violations imposed on the characters’ bodies within the text.

Wounds and scars become the etiology that reveals the ills of society. Therefore, they initiate the process leading to knowledge and action that awaken the victims to the possibility of better worlds. Thus, trauma narrative or “narrative scar” could be described as an apocalyptic moment in the text, an intruding otherness that is chaotic and crises-oriented. As such it demands new awareness on the part of the writer and the reader and, in particular the characters in the text. Therefore, the violence in itself is not the ethical centerpiece. Instead, it is how the victim uses the violence to outdo the violators that is the true ethical moment. To argue my point, I will use the works of Nawal El Saadawi(Egypt), Yvonne Vera(Zimbabwe), and Leonora Miano(Cameroon.)