The Prestige Of Violence: American Fiction, 1962-2007

Features of The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962-2007

In The Prestige of Violence Sally Bachner argues that starting in the 1960s American fiction laid claim to the status of serious literature by placing violence at the heart of its mission and then insisting that this violence could not be representedBachner demonstrates how many of the most influential novels of this period are united by the dramatic opposition they draw between a debased and untrustworthy conventional language on the one hand and a violence that appears to be prelinguistic and unquestionable on the other Genocide terrorism war torture slavery rape and murder are major themes yet the writers insist that such events are unspeakable Bachner takes issue with the claim made within trauma studies that history is the site of violent trauma inaccessible to ordinary representation Instead she argues both trauma studies and the fiction to which it responds institutionalize an inability to address violenceExamining such works as Vladimir Nabokovs Pale Fire Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 Norman Mailers Armies of the Night Margaret Atwoods Surfacing and Philip Roths The Plot Against America Bachner locates the postwar prestige of violence in the disjunction between the privileged security of wealthier Americans and the violence perpetrated by the United States abroad The literary investment in unspeakable and often immaterial violence emerges in Bachners readings as a complex and ideologically varied literary solution to the political geography of violence in our time