Abstract
Abstract This article examines one literary expression of the ambiguities of violence in community life through a reading of Patrick Friesen’s The Shunning. By looking to the ways in which the social bonds of community identity are achieved, maintained, and challenged within the ostensibly nonviolent community of Old Colony Russian Mennonites that Friesen’s work portrays, this study focuses on how confluences of community, power, and violence are represented in literary form. Using tools provided by Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community and Michel Foucault’s critique of Enlightenment blackmail, the following study brings aspects of Mennonite transgressive literature into conversation with critical theory and interprets the portrayal of community discipline in The Shunning within the broader context of the contested relationships between the Enlightenment, modernity, and postmodernity.
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