Showing posts with label Toni Morrison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Toni Morrison. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
The Fiction of Sexual Violence, pt. 2: Faulkner
In the first part of this series on the fiction of sexual violence, I briefly explained the twin aspects of "fiction" according to which I will explore this theme. I began with Toni Morrison's Beloved and a reading of the effects of Ella's experience as a sex slave (quite literally as a slave in the Antebellum South). And I suggested that we see in her trauma how sexual violence both disables a person's capacity for love (both loving and being loved) and dehumanizes the person in the process. In Faulkner’s Light in August, the sexual violence between Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden is different.
Friday, September 6, 2013
The Fiction of Sexual Violence, pt. 1: Morrison
This summer I (re)read a number of novels. And I had some separate
conversations about the nature and forms of sexual violence,
particularly its less perspicuous manifestations in common settings. I
would like to draft some soundings -- initial probings, investigations,
short essays -- on the connections between these two matters. And I hope
to do so by drawing upon three novels in particular: Toni Morrison's Beloved, William Faulkner's Light in August, and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace.
In a series of posts, then, I plan to explore the fiction of sexual violence. I consciously borrow the phrase from Arnold Weinstein's critical study The Fiction of Relationship. For him, there are "two fundamental notions" that the wording of his title expresses: "(1) the narrative literature of relationship, and (2) the view that relationship may be a fiction, something made rather than given, built out of belief, not fact" (Weinstein, 3). What interests me here is the intersection between stories about relationships, the ways in which those relationships are constructed, and the effects of varieties of unwanted sexual aggression.
Each post may stand on its own, but I anticipate that the each piece will contribute to a larger mosaic that both deepens and broadens our (or at least my) understanding of what is or is perceived as sexual violence, its effect on individuals discretely and collectively, and what all of this suggests about the narratives in which they occur and about the relational fictions of which they are constitutive. I begin with Morrison's Beloved.
In a series of posts, then, I plan to explore the fiction of sexual violence. I consciously borrow the phrase from Arnold Weinstein's critical study The Fiction of Relationship. For him, there are "two fundamental notions" that the wording of his title expresses: "(1) the narrative literature of relationship, and (2) the view that relationship may be a fiction, something made rather than given, built out of belief, not fact" (Weinstein, 3). What interests me here is the intersection between stories about relationships, the ways in which those relationships are constructed, and the effects of varieties of unwanted sexual aggression.
Each post may stand on its own, but I anticipate that the each piece will contribute to a larger mosaic that both deepens and broadens our (or at least my) understanding of what is or is perceived as sexual violence, its effect on individuals discretely and collectively, and what all of this suggests about the narratives in which they occur and about the relational fictions of which they are constitutive. I begin with Morrison's Beloved.
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