Metaphors Of Violence Research Articles

Mapping the Memory of Armed Conflict through Cancer in Gabriela Ybarra’s El comensal and Héctor Abad Faciolince’s El olvido que seremos

This study examines how Spanish author Gabriela Ybarra and Colombian Héctor Abad Faciolince tackle the parallel deaths of family members due to cancer and to the violence of armed conflict in their autobiographical novels El comensal (Spain, 2015) and El olvido que seremos (Colombia, 2006), respectively. Looking beyond the trope of cancer as metaphor, Ybarra and Abad Faciolince employ medical language to articulate the intergenerational mysteries surrounding instances of untimely death within their families. Cancer, thus, moves beyond a metaphor for violence and destruction, becoming a mode of representation for studying and articulating the unknown.

Metaphors of violence and survival: Primo Levi’s philosophy of chemistry

One of the principal dilemmas Holocaust survivors have faced is how to voice the traumatic memories that haunt them. Although in his seminal Language and Silence George Steiner once claimed that “the world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason”, the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi was an obvious exception in having been able to voice his trauma throughout his life by writing about it and analysing what happened to him. He has left us an oeuvre in which he unceasingly found ways to express his memories of the eleven months he spent in Auschwitz, from February 1944 until his liberation by the Russian Army in January 1945. This article demonstrates how Levi was able to express himself about the trauma he had experienced specifically by employing language and imagery derived from myths such as Tantalus and Homer’s Odyssey, but primarily also through the use of metaphor. Close attention is paid to the role of chemistry in Levi’s life, his philosophy of chemistry, how it influenced his literary career, and how in the face of persistent silence about the Holocaust the use of chemical metaphors in The Periodic Table (1975) provided Levi with a means to translate to himself and the world his harrowing memories of his year in Auschwitz.

Scripturalizing the Pandemic

Scripturalizing the Pandemic Jacqueline M. Hidalgo Anti-Blackness is a pandemic.1 Colonialism is a plague, capitalism is pandemic.2 In her analysis of California farmworker antipesticide campaigns in the 1960s, Laura Pulido describes how pesticides came to be “a metaphor for the larger power struggle.”3 Few imagined that farmworkers could band together and challenge how agribusiness functioned. Still, through contract negotiations, legal battles, public campaigns, and coalitions, some pesticides, most famously DDT, were banned. Now, in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has become a metaphor, or perhaps synecdoche, for the violence of racial capitalism.4 The pandemic has underscored how US racial capitalism as a structure of extraction is a form of collective violence that differentially devalues and fragments certain classes of people (and nonhuman nature) so that some are made more available to risk and exploitation.5 [End Page 625] The logics of racial capitalism also structure cultural norms such that we rarely question whether “value” is an appropriate metaphor for life. In the United States, African American and Native American communities have disproportionately suffered in the pandemic, with numbers of the sick and the dead far exceeding their portions of the US population, and ethnic Latinx/a/os have been disproportionately diagnosed with the disease.6 Meanwhile, by deporting detained migrants, the United States has helped spread COVID-19 to parts of Latin America.7 Since the early days of the pandemic in the United States, anti-Asian racism has displayed itself in aggressions targeting Asian American individuals and communities, even as Donald J. Trump’s administration has attempted to evade responsibility by labeling COVID-19 “Chinese.”8 Ekaputra Tupamahu dubbed this behavior “the perpetual foreigner virus” that “marginalizes Asian Americans.”9 Ageism and ableism also manifest in the ways that some sought to depict the virus as an irrelevant irritation that mostly harmed the elderly and those vulnerable through “pre-existing conditions,” as if some lives hold more “value” than others based on vulnerability.10 Too many of us who live in the United States know that racism is a preexisting condition.11 The epidemic of state-sanctioned murder and terrorization of Black [End Page 626] lives is not new as anti-Blackness pervades the past and present of the Americas and much of the world.12 The logics of exploitative domination that structure US racial capitalism have also structured the COVID-19 pandemic through hierarchal differentiations of ability, class, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality. With the pandemic ongoing, protesters have taken to the streets to draw attention to the virulence of anti-Black racism. Since the pandemic has become a metaphor for racial violence, we also must think about how we can heal ourselves from that violence. Steven McDonald argues that protests, though temporarily increasing the risk of COVID-19, are the best “medicine” in the long run.13 More people in the United States than ever before seem to agree. Notably, more Euro-Americans have appeared at protests in support of Black rights than in the many demonstrations since 2014.14 As I finish drafting this reflection in mid-June, cities across the United States are declaring racism a “public health crisis.”15 Biblical scholars are not strangers to the power and perils of metaphors, especially medical metaphors.16 Prominent in this time of pandemic has been a revisioning of the book of Revelation and its imaginative legacies. Alongside some intriguing allusions to the four horsemen (Rev 6), particularly pestilence, a different strain of apocalypticism has risen.17 Instead of fantasies of the end of the world, some public intellectuals turn toward apocalyptic frames as a source for hopeful [End Page 627] revelation and possible transformation.18 Reflections on the current apocalypse respond to a crisis in meaning, where colonizing narratives of domination no longer obscure unjust violence. Many minoritized biblical critics study what we study precisely because we know well the masks of dominant myths and the power that minoritized communities have found in subverting those myths. As David A. Sánchez argued, subverting Rome’s myths plays a central role in shaping the Apocalypse’s intertextual play, and then, as Revelation becomes central to the myths undergirding modern Spanish...

ТВОРЧІСТЬ ВЛАДИСЛАВА ШЛЕНГЕЛЯ У КОНТЕКСТІ НЕПРОФЕСІЙНИХ ПОЕТІВ ВАРШАВСЬКОГО ГЕТТО

The article analyzes the works of Władysław Szlengel and non-professional poets of the Warsaw ghetto. Władysław Szlengel is the most popular author of the Warsaw ghetto who wrote his works in Polish. He is the author of a volume of poems Co czytałem umarłym. Non-professional poets are those Jewish authors who wrote one or more poems dedicated to the Holocaust. The author of the article is focused on the poetics of texts wrote by Szlengel and other Polish-Jewish poets. A comparative analysis of the works of Szlengel and non-professional poets is conducted to show different models of the functioning of the same topos and motives of the Holocaust in texts of a professional poet and in the work of unknown authors. The article also deals with the most important motifs of the Warsaw ghetto literature, such as a wall, a window to the Aryan side, death, a child, etc. The presence of these motifs in both professional and amateur works indicates the development of a similar language of expression in texts written by Jews imprisoned in the ghetto during World War II. However, these motifs are used in the works of various authors in more or less interesting ways. The artistic quality of the text is determined by the originality of the development of Holocaust motifs. The author of the article pays special attention to the analysis of the motif of a window and a wall, which define the specificity of the ghetto space in the lyrics of the ghetto. The window and wall also have a symbolic function as a metaphor for enslavement and violence.

'Marks on bodies' : agential cuts as felt experience

Reflecting upon the notion of 'marked bodies' (Barad, 2007) as a metaphor for violence, the author draws upon their experience on a long-term, arts-based research/creation project with women who have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and critically considers the ways in which 'emotion' can be conceptualized as both a territory and an agential force. Lived experience with borderline personality disorder often involves long and repeated periods of suicidal ideation and self- harm, yet these experiences are often misunderstood and framed in ways that invalidate emotional distress. The author outlines the ways in which vulnerability as method and radical acceptance of emotional contagion (Brennan, 2004) can foster 'differential responsiveness' (Barad, 2007; 2014) to marks on bodies and allow for the emergence of 'borderline narratives' to emerge and intervene within expert knowledge systems.

'Marks on bodies' : agential cuts as felt experience

Reflecting upon the notion of 'marked bodies' (Barad, 2007) as a metaphor for violence, the author draws upon their experience on a long-term, arts-based research/creation project with women who have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and critically considers the ways in which 'emotion' can be conceptualized as both a territory and an agential force. Lived experience with borderline personality disorder often involves long and repeated periods of suicidal ideation and self- harm, yet these experiences are often misunderstood and framed in ways that invalidate emotional distress. The author outlines the ways in which vulnerability as method and radical acceptance of emotional contagion (Brennan, 2004) can foster 'differential responsiveness' (Barad, 2007; 2014) to marks on bodies and allow for the emergence of 'borderline narratives' to emerge and intervene within expert knowledge systems.

Major Prophets

Major Prophets Christopher T. Begg, Rory K. Pitstick, Paul R. Redditt, Isaac M. Alderman, and Fred W. Guyette 1913. [Prophets/Prophetic Literature] Esther Fuchs, “Women as Prophets/Women in Prophets: Gender, Nation and Discourse,” Feminist Theory and the Bible, 95–113 [see #2022]. An intertextual reading of women as prophets and women in the prophets in the Hebrew Bible reveals that privileged speech is gendered. While narrative texts tend to inscribe and erase women’s prophecies, prophetic literature tends to erase them completely. To the extent that women prophets are inscribed in the narrative text, they are interpolated as subjects in a national saga of military confrontations with various collective enemies. Female prophetic roles are indistinguishable from their political roles in the continuous struggle against the foreign others. The violent language of national demarcation and differentiation is ascribed to women prophets, who thus are made to legitimize and sanction it. These speaking bodies reproduce the nation, culturally and discursively. As the cultural reproducers of the nation women prophets embody one category of idealized feminine identity. As prophets then Israelite women inscribed in the pedagogic narrative are part of a gendered as well as a national script. As poetic figures in prophetic literature women’s bodies are constructed as signifying representations of the nation as such. The signifying body appears as the sexual object of male violence, or as the victimized body of mother/daughter Zion. The metaphoric representation of the nation is a performative elaboration of the narrative script. The performative script which focuses on the nation’s failures and errors is no less “nationalistic” in the sense of its effort to identify a plurality and diversity of subjects as a unitary coherent collective. This imaginary community is repeatedly signified through a seriality of collective subjects among which the female body is only one. [End Page 666] The violence directed at the nation rather than by the nation captures the pivotal moment of political demise, even as the female body signifies the nation at the point of disintegration and defeat. By attributing to the signifying body a series of synonymous deviations from the pedagogic script, prophetic discourse reinterprets, reconstructs, re-encodes, and further elaborates the narration of the nation in poetic terms. The symbolic, recursive, and repetitive poetry of performative discourse envisions the nation’s future, while evaluating, criticizing, and condemning its past. The performative discourse thus affirms national continuity by reinventing and recasting the nation in a new proliferation of shifting subjects and predicates, all pointing to the idea of a shared past and a shared future. Feminist criticism has correctly pointed to the breakdown of the marital and sexual metaphor, and its questionable effectiveness as a representation of a sanctioned relationship. What I have tried to do here is to extend this analysis even further by adding a postcolonial dimension to what has already been written. The postcolonial perspective bridges the divide between those feminists who focus on the signifier, namely, the metaphor of sexual violence, and those who focus on the signified, namely, the nation. Postcolonial theory suggests that the signified is also a signifier, namely, that the nation as well is a metaphor of collective identity, a discursive phenomenon that moves between narration and poetic representation, pedagogy and performance. As such the nation should be as much the object of feminist inquiry as the sexual and marital metaphor which generated so much debate and continues to generate a considerable body of scholarship and historical as well as literary interpretation. (author’s conclusion, adapted, pp. 111–12)—C.T.B. 1914. [Prophetic Literature] Donatella Scaiola, “Abramo nella tradizione profetica,” RSB 26 (2014) 75–87. Prophetic texts rarely make reference to Abraham, but the references that do exist are largely in harmony with the Genesis portrait, except for their focusing primarily on Abraham’s positive characteristics and at the same time emphasizing much more than Genesis does the fidelity of God rather than the faith of Abraham. In the biblical tradition, Abraham was evidently a symbol continually recast as a key for the development and expression of Israel’s understanding of its own identity and vocation.—R.K.P. 1915. [Prophetic Literature] Massimilliano...

Abuse and shame in Homer and medicine

ABSTRACTLearning through ritual humiliation used to be standard in work-based medical education as a rite of passage, a militaristic hardening. More enlightened pedagogies have emerged, but such abusive and shaming practices still linger, especially in surgery. Humiliation now includes harassment of women trainees through overt and covert sexism. We explore the resilience of such “compulsory mis-education” through “thinking with Homer.” Returning to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as Ur-texts for shaping the human imagination, we re-read shame and abuse in medical contexts, suggesting that these are products of historical shaping by metaphors of violence and conflict. It is only when such primary metaphors shift and more liberal metaphors emerge that a more collaborative and feminine medical culture will be shaped. We draw on distinctions between “honor–shame”/“tradition-directed” and “guilt”/“inner-directed” behaviors to explore medicine’s lingering authoritarianism. The former rely on gaining respect from peers or being ostracized (losing face), where as the latter depend upon an internalized moral code expressed as pride or guilt (conscience). While structural changes will enable a more democratic medical culture to emerge, medical education can facilitate such change through promoting learner-centered techniques such as supportive and constructive feedback.

“Not Peace but a Sword”: Jesus and the Sword in Matthew

South African society is characterised by the violence of crime, poverty and inequality as well as civil rebellion and disobedience, posing the question to Christians whether they should and may participate in violence against injustice and crime, and as a possible reaction to, for example, poor service delivery or civil rights wrongs. This article limits the discussion about the possible justification of the Christian’s use of violence to Matthew’s references to the sword as a metaphor of violence within the context of Jesus’s ministry. The first reference is found when Jesus prepares the apostles for the Jewish mission in Matthew 10, and he states that they should not suppose that he has come to bring peace to the earth, but a sword, because his coming will turn the members of their own households against them. Did Jesus endorse and encourage violence, even if presumably a righteous kind of violence? During his arrest scene, in Matthew 26, an unknown companion of Jesus reaches for his sword and strikes the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear. Jesus responds by commanding the disciple to put his sword back in place, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” These references to “sword” are discussed in order to answer the question whether Jesus in any way supported violence.

Performing Gender, Performing Violence on the Northern Irish Stage: ‘Spittin’ Blood in a Belfast Sink'

This essay explores the representation of sexual and domestic violence in Northern Ireland, in the public forum of the theatre, during the years immediately preceding the 1994 Ceasefire and following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Drawing upon Richard Schechner's definition of performance as an inclusive term that incorporates a wide range of human activity from theatre to ritual and the performance of everyday life to sports, the arts, ceremonies and ‘performances of great magnitude’, this essay progresses from the assumption that these theatrical representations reflect aspects of the social world. Following an overview of the context of the works in relation to social attitudes towards sexual and domestic violence, the essay briefly explores the use of rape and gender violence as a metaphor for colonial and political violence, using the example of Carville's comedy 'Family Plot'. The essay then turns to an examination of more radical, or challenging works: Derry Frontline's Threshold, an overtly political, pre-Ceasefire, devised play, and works by Reid and Devlin that challenge the male-dominated narrative of the ‘Troubles’ by dramatizing the effects of the violence on ordinary women. Finally, the essay considers the post-Ceasefire period and the emergence of new, women-oriented initiatives like the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition, drawing out a connection between the new emerging society, the persistence of traditional models of gendered behaviour, and contemporary work that dramatizes violence against women: Byrne's Don't Say a Word and Spallen's Pumpgirl.

Rape and Rape Mythology in the Plays of Sarah Kane

Few contemporary plays have created greater furor than Sarah Kane's Blasted, first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in January 1995. (1) The violence was pervasive, the structure seemingly incoherent, the purpose elusive. Critics were almost uniformly hostile. (2) It was, according to one, disgusting feast of filth, while another concluded that not theatre critic that's required, it's psychiatrist. (3) They were barely more enamored of later plays such as Phaedra's Love and Cleansed. Criticism has tended to soften over time. (4) Indeed, the greater danger today, decade after her tragic early death, is that of critical hagiography, with Kane lauded as one of the most original of breed of dynamic in-yer-face or new brutalist dramatists who rose to prominence during the 1990s. (5) One of the characteristics of this genre of drama was peculiarly intense embrace of sex and violence. (6) Violence certainly emerged as defining feature of Kane's writing. (7) And when Kane sought to intensify the violence of her plays she turned repeatedly to rape. (8) The purpose of this essay is to explore Kane's presentation of within the context of the ongoing feminist debate regarding sexual violence and its attendant As we shall see this presentation creates as many tensions as it does affinities. The first part of this essay will revisit rape, and more particularly the enduring force of rape myths. The second will then consider Kane on rape: its presentation in her plays and its consideration in her subsequent interviews. It has been said that Blasted is play of strategic incoherences. (9) The final part of this essay will contemplate Kane and in the context of this apparently perplexing supposition. It will be necessarily interdisciplinary exercise, enjoining growing body of law and literature scholarship which makes the case for the use of literary texts in legal study. Such strategy is commonly recommended for variety of reasons: to impress the linguistic and rhetorical nature of law; to emphasize the historicity of legal text; to nurture more nuanced appreciation of poethicar dimension of law; and above all, perhaps, to stress the illustrative value of the literary text as an informing educative aid. (10) It is to this latter purpose that this essay is primarily written. I. Rape and Myth The crime of represents something of touchstone in feminist legal and political theory. According to Robin Morgan, is the perfected act of male sexuality in patriarchal culture, the ultimate metaphor for domination, violence, subjugation, and possession. (11) Ann Cahill writes in similar vein. Rape is a crime that epitomizes women's oppressed status, one of indisputable violence and loathing. (12) For much of the 1970s and 1980s it was possible to distinguish two alternative and hugely influential positions. The first, associated commonly with Susan Brownmiller, argued that is less about sex, and more about simple violence committed by men against women, a brief expression of physical power, conscious process of intimidation, blunt, ugly sexual invasion with possible lasting effects on all women. (13) The second, favored by many critical legal feminists, followed Catharine MacKinnon in arguing, to the contrary, that is logical extension of heterosexuality. (14) Adopting position that owed much to the influence of Andrea Dworkin, MacKinnon argued in her Toward Feminist Theory of the State that the wrong of has proved so difficult to define because the unquestionable starting point has been that is defined as distinct from intercourse, while for women it is difficult to distinguish the two under conditions of male dominance. (15) Accordingly, she famously concluded, If sexuality is central to women's definition and forced sex is central to sexuality, is indigenous, not exceptional, to women's social condition. …

Law and Its Rhetoric of Violence

This article explores the manner in which politico-legal language makes use of metaphors of violence and destruction in order to describe state/legal functions and actions. It argues that although such use of a militaristic hyperbole is generally regarded as normal and appropriate, it is in fact harmful in the way that it presents complex and specific problems as being simple and abstract. From a semiotic point of view, and using the work of Roland Barthes, law is regarded as a system of signs and ‘combative’ legal language can be seen as ideological manipulation through the technique of so-called second-level signification (myth). Although it is conceded that law, similar to all other interpretive systems, cannot avoid the use of metaphoric language, it is argued that we should resist regarding legal language as neutral and ‘natural’ and that we should rather retain the memory of legal concepts and categories as historical, man-made, and therefore always open to revision.

IMPERIAL BARBARIANS: PRIMITIVE MASCULINITY IN LOST WORLD FICTION

Cecil Rhodes, the “Colossus” of late Victorian empire, proudly proclaimed himself a barbarian. He spoke of his taste for things “big and simple, barbaric, if you like,” and boasted that he conducted himself “on the basis of a barbarian” (Millin 165, 242). His famous scholarships designed to turn out men fit for imperial mastery required success in “manly outdoor sports,” a criterion Rhodes privately called the proof of “brutality” (Stead 39). Yet while Rhodes celebrated qualities he called barbaric or brutal, his adversaries seized upon the same rhetoric to revile him. During the Boer War, for instance, the tactics by which Rhodes and his friends tightened their grip on South Africa were boldly condemned by Henry Campbell-Bannerman as “methods of barbarism.” Similarly, G. K. Chesterton denounced Rhodes as nothing more than a “Sultan” who conquered the “East” only to reinforce the backward “Oriental” values of fatalism and despotism (242–44). This strange consensus, in which Rhodes and his critics could agree about his barbarity, reflects a significant uncertainty about late Victorian imperial ambitions and their relationship to “barbarism.” Clearly, the term was available both to the empire's critics as a metaphor for unprincipled or indiscriminate violence and to imperialists as a justification for their efforts to bring civilization to the Earth's dark places, to spread the gospel, and to enforce the progress of history that the anthropologist E. B. Tylor called “the onward movement from barbarism” (29). But Rhodes's cheerful assertion of his own barbarity represents something altogether different: the apparent paradox of an imperialism that openly embraces the primitive. Nor was Rhodes alone in sounding this particularly troubling version of the barbaric yawp. During the period of the New Imperialism (1871–1914), Victorian popular culture became engrossed as never before in charting vectors of convergence between the British and those they regarded as primitive, and in imagining the ways in which barbarians might make the best imperialists of all. This transvaluation of savagery found its most striking expression in the emergence of a wildly popular genre of fiction: stories of lost worlds.

Kommentar zum Tischgebet des Prudentius (cath.3). By MARIA BECKER.

Prudentius may be the single most important Latin poet of Late Antiquity, as Maria Becker states at the outset of her fine book, a commentary on Cathemerinon 3 (pp. 47–260) with introduction (pp. 1–28) and Latin text and facing German translation (pp. 30–45). Yet the first comprehensive treatment of Prudentius’ work in English dates from as recently as 1989 and, despite a growing number of studies published since then, we are still far from able to paint a detailed picture of Prudentius’ poetic universe. What we lack in particular are commentaries that put our understanding of Prudentius’ poetry philologically on safer ground. Becker's book is such a work. It focuses on only one poem. This, however, contains all the wealth of imagery of Prudentius’ poetry as in a microcosm. Most of it pertains to smell and taste, but there are also violent and erotic images. A fish's mouth is torn and bloodied by an angler's hook. Cattle are ‘murdered’ and shredded into bloody pieces. The Virgin's pregnant body is repeatedly invoked in no uncertain terms, as is Eve's seduction by the serpent and her subsequent suffering as an oppressed housewife. Buckets are foaming with snow-white milk gushing from twin breasts, honey is perspired by the bee hive. The sweet smell of roses, honey, and apples is mixed with the foul smell of corpses. True, Prudentius’ aim is to deny what he affirms: it is the untouched Virgin who conceives. It is God's word that is sweet. It is not meat that is consumed. In fact, the hymn promotes vegetarianism, as Becker explains in a thirty-page excursus (pp. 105–37). But herein also lies the mystery of Prudentius’ poetry: in an effort to overcome passion, passion is aroused by the most sensual imagery, much of which is borrowed from classical literature. The meaning, function, and ultimate purpose of this technique is not yet fully understood. Becker is right in pointing to the typology of Eve and the Virgin as a key motif more than previous studies have done and in developing it in a second long excursus (pp. 210–25). Yet even she does not quite explain why Prudentius embellished it in such erotic terms, mixing metaphors of violence, food, and smell with allusions to the act of procreation that are supposed to constitute a denial of sexual activity (and a denial of physical pleasure in general) and an affirmation of the ascetic, the ‘taming’ of the body by depriving it of pleasure, be it by abstaining from meat (product of physical violence against animals) or by celebrating virginity. The wider ascetic background of Prudentius’ poetry is, of course, well known. What is less understood is why this asceticism operated with such sensual, including violent and sexual, imagery. In that respect, Prudentius’ poetry is as puzzling and probably as little understood as some of Jerome's prose still is, where the same technique is used. Here much interpretative work still needs to be done. But from now on at least we have Becker's excellent commentary as an indispensable aid in that pursuit.

The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction Melissa Wender (bio) The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction. By Douglas N. Slaymaker. RoutledgeCurzon, London, 2004. x, 205 pages. £85.00. When I attempt to focus my thoughts about the body in postwar Japanese fiction, my mind begins to reel. My own recent research reminds me of how buraku and Zainichi Korean authors question the meanings of "blood" and the invisibility of their difference; of individual physical violence as metaphor for national violence; and of the intense physicality of all aspects of life [End Page 482] in the work of Yang Sogil. Yang, whose fiction is both critically acclaimed and stunningly popular, is obsessed with the notion of the "Asian body." This body—unlike that of the contemporary resident of Japan—emerges from and on occasion even revels in its experience of corporeal brutality, animalistic urges (whether for food or sex), and manual labor. The last of these terms is crucial, for Yang's intent is to criticize the way that Japan's economic success has numbed its populace to the very sensations of being alive. At the same time, like many other students of Japanese literature, I think of how the big names of the postwar period, from Hayashi Fumiko to Mishima Yukio, Ōe Kenzaburō, Murakami Ryō, and Yamada Eimi, reflect upon sexuality and gender identity, and frequently their intersection with race (usually Japanese versus white or black). I do not expect Douglas Slaymaker or any other scholar to be able to present a coherent synthesis of all of these issues in a single volume, even if it has a title as grand as this one. I am not even certain such a task would be possible or useful. Rather, I begin my consideration of this book, the primary focus of which is the so-called "flesh writing" (nikutai bungaku) of the early postwar era, by seconding the author's contention that a careful examination of these sometimes-overlooked works will deepen our understanding of Japanese literature in the decades succeeding them. The above thoughts, however random, bring home one of Slaymaker's most important observations: the texts he examines are "foundational to a palette of images that continues to energize imaginaries of the body, and the ramifications of this conceptualization extend to the fiction being produced at the end of the twentieth century" (p. 162). One might imagine, from the above, that the book excavates a range of postwar texts in an effort to reveal the influence of these flesh writers. Rather, The Body of Postwar Fiction joins recent analyses of post-1945 Japanese culture such as John Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (Norton, 1999), Michael Molasky's The Postwar Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory (Routledge, 1999), and Yoshikuni Igarashi's Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton University Press, 2000) by taking as its major focus the early postwar period. This volume is by no means redundant with these other works, for Slaymaker's scope is not as broad as Dower's or Igarashi's and he treats a different set of texts and takes a different approach from Molasky. For the most part, Slaymaker's set of texts consists of the fiction and essays of Tamura Taijirō, Noma Hiroshi, and Sakaguchi Ango, discussed in chapters three, four, and five, respectively. Consideration of these writers is bracketed by contextualizing chapters. In chapter one, he provides a history of the usage and changing connotations of terms of the body before these authors were active. He takes great pains to trace the use of nikutai, but he also [End Page 483] examines the words shintai, seishin, and kokutai and, in chapter two, the role of "the woman's body" in the works of the flesh writers. In chapter six, he turns to the work of five women writers in the 1950s. Although there are references to historical circumstances and the historical references in the texts, historical events per se do not figure large. Nor does some grand theory such as psychoanalysis or poststructuralism. Instead, Slaymaker carefully reports what these writers said, what...

Beyond Crime and Punishment: Metaphor of Violence in Iain Banks’s Complicity

Trying to decide on the place of art/literature in the network of codes and its relationship to what we recognize as reality, we are offered a number of interpretations, some of which support the theory that perception of reality in a text is influenced by social circumstances and by a number of factors relating to them. Therefore, “reality” cannot be seen as a reflection of any particular “natural” state, order or organization. Literature questions the assumption that coding is natural, much in the same way that language questions the assumption that there is an intrinsic order governing the world as a natural structure. It engages different voices and ideologies in a dialogue inside the same text, achieving the effect opposite to habitualization, i.e. defamiliarization. Corresponding to the culture of excess, Iain Bank’s Complicity, pinpoints representations of postmodern “reality” within the framework of postindustrial consumption culture. It deploys defamiliarization strategies of juxtaposing violence and power, taking advantage of the conventions of generic fiction of which violence is a mandatory constituent.

Public relations battles and wars: journalistic clichés and the potential for conflict resolution

The association of public relations with images of hostile relationships and metaphors of violence in the Canadian print news media was explored. A search of the on-line data base Canadian Newspaper Source provided a sample of articles which used the terms public relations battle or public relations war to describe a variety of communications between organizations and publics; analysis suggests the phrases were inflammatory, and often did not accurately reflect intent and/or reality. The implications of journalists’ use of these metaphors of violence were discussed in the context of public relations as a means of bringing about harmony in relationships.

Collaboration, competition and violence in eighth‐grade students’ classroom writing

We examined gender features in eighth‐grade students’ writing in terms of the relationships among characters and the use of violence, comparing our analyses to perspectives offered by the students in small group conversations. By using a variety of data collection techniques, we were able to extend the findings of previous studies, identifying several instances of students’ willingness to cross gender lines in ways that seemed acceptable to their peer audiences. In contrast to the gender stereotypes that prevailed in the writing analyzed in previous studies, we found evidence of competitive relationships within sports and romance stories, as well as elements of violence and metaphors of violence in some of the girls’ writing. Affiliation among male characters was a theme within some of the boys’ narratives, as well.

The private rod: marital violence, sensation, and the law in Victorian Britain

Sensation novels, a genre characterized by scandalous narratives, and emotionally and socially provocative dialogue and plots, had their heyday in England in the 1860s and 1870s, in the midst of growing concern about codes of behaviour in marriage. Largely excluded from the academic canon of the late 20th century, sensation novels had an impact on Victorian culture that we have only recently begun to evaluate. Exploring the central metaphor of marital violence in these novels, Marlene Tromp uncovers the relationship between the representations of such violence in fiction and in the law. Her investigation demonstates that sensational constructions of gender, marriage, brutal relationships and even murder were gradually incorporated into legal debates and fiction as the Victorian understanding of what was real changed. Sensation fiction's reconfiguration of literary and social norms, evident in works by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, is also explicitly evoked in the realist representations of domestic violence in novels by Margaret Oliphant and George Eliot. Despite the apparent gulf between fiction and the law, Tromp explores these texts as mutually constitutive forms through which a major shift in the understanding of domesticity took place. The Victorians responded to marital violence by debating its terms in both Parliament and the circulating libraries, incorporating the language of each realm into the other. By the end of the century, this cross-pollinating conversation threatened the tenuous legal and social fiction of peace and safety in the middle-class home, and new readings of the relationship between domesticity and violence emerged.

And the mirror cracked: feminist cinema and film theory

Acknowledgements - Introduction - What Meets the Eye: An Overview of Feminist Film Theories - In Pursuit of the Author: On Cinematic Directorship: The Subjective Factor - Silent Violence: On Point of View: Dust and Cruel Embrace - And the Mirror Cracked: On Metaphors of Violence and Resistance: A Question of Silence and Broken Mirrors - Forces of Subversion: On the Excess of the Image: Bagdad Cafe and Sweetie - The Navel of the Film: On the Abject and the Masquerade: The Virgin Machine - Epilogue - Notes - Bibliography - Filmography - Index