Minor Literature Research Articles

Self-reflective “Minority literature” : A Stylistic Profile of a Case study

Self-reflective “Minority literature” : A Stylistic Profile of a Case study

William (Bill) Calin (1936-2018)

William (Bill) Calin (1936-2018) F. Regina Psaki William Compaine Calin died on May 20, 2018 at Lake City Medical Center in Gainesville, Florida at the age of 82. Bill Calin was born on April 4, 1936, in Newington, Connecticut, only child of Isadore ("Jack") Calin and Nettie Compaine, originally from Romania and Russia. Bill often described his parents as committed communists; their son, as some apples do, rolled as far from the tree as possible. Bill loved talking politics; he relished disagreement and debate, and never saw any reason for such conversations to become aggressive or divisive. He deplored the factionalism that has riven American politics and the disappearance of the concept of "loyal opposition." If Bill could have bottled his gift for lively yet friendly—even affectionate—political wrangling, he'd have made a fortune, and the entire polity would have been the better for it. Click for larger view View full resolution Bill in 1963 (Guggenheim archives) Click for larger view View full resolution Bill in May, 2017 (photo by Kathryn Klingebiel) Bill studied in Paris during his junior year in college. There he fell in love with French Romanesque and Gothic architecture, which led him to his research and teaching specialities of medieval French and Occitan literature and culture—as well as to middle English and, later, to modern Occitan, Breton, and lowland Scots. His published obituary noted that "While he published more in one lifetime than many could do in five, his creative and analytical energies would have taken five lifetimes to exhaust." This is no exaggeration, and no short tribute can do justice to the variety and copia of his publications. Fully 25% of [End Page 224] his published articles are dedicated to Occitan; this tribute will highlight some of his Occitan professional activities. Bill took his undergraduate degree at Yale College (1957) and his Ph.D. from Yale University (1960). From then on, in his teaching and writing alike, he communicated both his knowledge and his love of the rich contributions that France has made to world culture. He taught at Dartmouth, Stanford, the University of Oregon, and, since 1988, the University of Florida, as Graduate Research Professor in French Literature. He was a visiting professor at academic institutions in North America and Europe and delivered 230 conference papers and invited lectures. A quintessential teacher and researcher, Bill won eleven major grants from national and/or international scholarly organizations, including the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He was an International Vice President of the Association Internationale d'Études Occitanes (1993-2002). He was on the editorial board of numerous journals, including Tenso, and served in many international organizations, such as the Centre international de l'écrit en occitan (1996 until his death) and the MLA Division of Provençal and Catalan. He was proud to have been elected a Sòci dóu Felibrige in 1993. Bill published twelve books covering a broad range of French literature, from the earliest epics of France, through the lyric production of poets such as Guillaume de Machaut, to modernity and medievalism. His expertise also included the so-called 'minority' languages and literatures of the British Isles and France, on the one hand, and the ways in which the modern world imagines, studies, and understands the Middle Ages, on the other. His later books include The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England; Minority Literatures and Modernism: Scots, Breton, and Occitan, 1920-1990; The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics: From Spitzer to Frye; and The Lily and the Thistle: The French Tradition and the Older Literature of Scotland; Essays in Criticism. In addition, Bill published over 120 articles and book chapters on many topics (see below for those on Occitan) and reviewed [End Page 225] 27 books in learned journals. His last Occitan essay appeared in Spring 2018 in this journal, a fitting conclusion to his career as an occitaniste. Bill was twice married and remained dear friends with his former wives. Though he had no children or siblings, he is survived by many whom he called "academic daughters and sons," whom he mentored...

Re-Presentation and Re-Memory of the Southern Landscape in Cane : Jean Toomer’s Memorial Minor Writing

In Cane, Jean Toomer’s poems, sketches and songs are images of nature and cities, of rural and urban environments. Cane is a landscape conceived and designed by a man who struggled for understanding and is about a man’s own perceptions of Black life in the South. By focusing on some of the poems and sketches we will see how Toomer, by appropriating the language, linked life and work to unveil the memory and truth of the Southern landscape. Toomer provided multiple entries into his text, a characteristic of “minor literature” as exposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Mille Plateaux. Thus, we will try to assess the variability of interpretations of Toomer’s text through his writing and re-memory of the South.

Kafka’s Other Prague: Writing from the Czechoslovak Republic by Anne Jamison

Reviewed by: Kafka’s Other Prague: Writing from the Czechoslovak Republic by Anne Jamison David Suchoff Anne Jamison. Kafka’s Other Prague: Writing from the Czechoslovak Republic. Northwestern UP, 2018. x + 222 pp. Anne Jamison’s Kafka’s Other Prague: Writing from the Czechoslovak Republic breaks new ground in the reading of Kafka as a translinguistic, postnational, and Jewish writer. Focusing on the period from Czech independence in 1918—the end of German’s linguistic domination of Prague—to Kafka’s death in 1924, the “other” of the book’s title opens up Kafka’s Czech linguistic, literary, and political connections more historically and textually than previous studies. Jamison expertly presents unknown—to non-Czech readers—linguistic, political, and literary texts that shaped Kafka’s late work. She does so without the least monolinguistic determinism, in order to launch acute new translinguistic readings of well-known Kafka works. “The primacy of language” in Kafka’s world, as she writes of his post-1918 situation, “brings the text closer to, rather than further away from, events and relations in the extra-textual biographical, and historical ‘real world’ of Kafka’s Czechoslovak Prague” (111). Kafka’s Other Prague offers a powerful revision of Delueze and Guattari’s capture of Kafka’s concept of small or minor literatures, using Czech writings and debates on language and identity from the period. Jamison sees the other not as seeking to inhabit the major but as a multiple historical perspective that opens up a different cultural space. Jamison shows how the sharp difference between spoken Czech, which Kafka used to enable him to keep his insurance job after 1918, and its standard form, which he had not mastered, opens up a translational perspective on the linguistic politics in his writings, creating critical effects in his thematics of gender and in his views of the minority voice. Rich readings of Czech context show how Kafka’s “assault against boundaries” (qtd. in Jamison 77), as his 1922 diary entry put it, took a multiplicity of forms. Jamison reads Kafka’s The Castle against an earlier 1921 diary entry that describes an assault that can take place “von unten” (78), or from below, or “von oben,” above, and hence as linguistically multiple against the social background. The ascendancy of Czech in 1918, for a German-speaking but Jewish Fremder, or foreigner, as The Castle describes K., could mean that a previously dominated Czech populace could be felt as an “assault . . . from below,” as well as an “assault from above,” given the newly sovereign linguistic order. The brilliance of Kafka’s Other Prague consists of such readings: its ability to take “a frame of reference far removed from the contingent, quotidian Prague” and then use material from Czech in the period to portray a “basic structure” (79) in Kafka, “in which [End Page 743] the terms and their interrelations are in flux” (79–80). Jamison uses Czech texts like Sergej Karcevskij’s later “The Asymmetric Dualism of the Linguistic Sign” or Jan Mukařovský’s ”On the Problem of Functions in Architecture” to make available the multiple meanings of architectural space and public sculpture as multiply inflected languages in Imperial German- and Czech-speaking, then-sovereign Prague, as in the case of the Jan Hus monument. Jamison shows how such imagery of nativity parallels scenes in The Castle that bring the question of foreignness as part of the native into focus, helping to establish Kafka’s practice of “establishing and deforming patterns” in his work (143). Jamison provides linguistic surveys and their debates as well as important analyses of Prague’s Czech Press, which published philological and avant-garde journals that Kafka was familiar with and the first translation of Kafka (by Milena Jensenská). For Jamison, Kafka’s method is enlarged by “cultural realities such as bilingualism, intermarriage, and translation” (10), which enabled him to use univocal icons in unique ways: in Kafka’s Other Prague, rather than serving as an image of unifying authority, the Castle’s tower becomes instead a symbol of formative linguistic differences. Jamison thus sees no “either-or logic of the nation state for Kafka” (6) and, for critics, no either-or choice between Kafka...

Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism by Kata Gellen

Reviewed by: Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism by Kata Gellen Holly Yanacek Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism. By Kata Gellen. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 250. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-0810138933. With Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism, Kata Gellen makes an important contribution to modernist scholarship and the interdisciplinary field of sound studies through her analysis of noise in Kafka's oeuvre. The book participates in the recent turn in scholarship to define "modernist epistemologies"—that is, to examine "the ways in which modernist art and literature produce new modes of perception and knowledge" (199). Gellen aims to show how Kafka responds to two central crises of modernism—the crisis of narration and the crisis of knowledge—through the treatment of noise in his collected stories, notebooks, and letters. A central premise of this book is that noise is a "productive obstacle" in modernist literary narration in general and in Kafka's works in particular (3). Gellen's interpretations reveal that Kafka never settled on a single, unified approach to sound. Instead, she emphasizes that each one of Kafka's texts that deals with sound presents a different attempt to explore the productive tension between noise and writing (33). Noise puts a strain on many of the characters in Kafka's stories, and Gellen's book examines the literary significance of these disruptive, persistent, and enigmatic noises. Kafka and Noise is noteworthy as the first sustained English-language study of sound in Kafka's collected works. Jürgen Daiber's Kafka und der Lärm: Klanglandschaften der frühen Moderne (2015) demonstrates a similar interest in sound in Kafka's writings; however, the book primarily focuses on Kafka's own frustrations with noise that disrupted his writing. Gellen adds to the scholarship on Kafka and sound through her innovative application of film theory and her focus not on Kafka's biographical writings, but on the literary significance of noise in his narration. Her approach yields fresh interpretations of Kafka's stories, including "Großer Lärm" (1912), "Die Verwandlung" (1915), "Das Schweigen der Sirenen" (1917), "Forschungen eines Hundes" (1922), "Der Bau" (1923), and "Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse" (1924). Although the use of film theory to analyze sound in Kafka's works is new, the study of the connection between Kafka and cinema has a long history, which Gellen traces back to Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno's debates about gesture in Kafka's writing in the 1930s. Inspired also by Gilles Deleuze and [End Page 613] Félix Guattari's interpretation of noise in Kafka in their theory of a minor literature, Gellen picks up where these critics left off and offers sustained close readings of the problem of sound in Kafka's works. Gellen's justification for her approach to analyze Kafka's literary works and silent film together in Kafka and Noise is persuasive. Concepts from film theory, such as acoustic close-up and acousmatic sound, provide the language necessary to analyze noise in literature, a silent medium. Gellen's application of these concepts offers new insights into Kafka's works that would not be possible with literary concepts and narrative theory alone. In addition, the interpretation of literary sound with film terminology illuminates what literature (and cinema) can do and what it cannot do, and thus this book makes a significant contribution to genre studies. There is another reason why concepts from film theory, rather than concepts in the field of sound studies, form the methodological underpinning of Kafka and Noise. According to Gellen, sound studies has "has, to a large extent, ignored literary sound" because literature is a medium that does not directly produce actual sounds (203). However, she argues that sound studies would have much to gain by focusing on literary sound as an object of analysis, and her book makes a strong case for that assertion. In each of the book's four chapters, Gellen introduces concepts from film theory and applies them in her close readings of Kafka's letters and stories, which she interprets...

Leopoldo María Panero, poeta menor

The social status of Spanish poet Leopoldo María Panero as a poète maudit preconditions the reception and therefore the readings of his work. Malediction thus becomes an often-simplified metanarrative that determines the interpretation of texts and places writing within a stable and allegedly marginal location in relationship to a presupposed central literary and sociocultural canon. This essay illuminates a set of connections that can be established between Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of minor literature, as developed in their seminal work Kafka: por una literatura menor, and some of the most relevant aspects of deterritorialization in Panero’s expression, understood as minor practice. An analysis of the tendency of Panero’s oeuvre towards minority as the force at the core of his literary expression and the concept of the minor in literature can help unlock a reading of the poet’s work that avoids aprioristic categorizations and meta-interpretations.

Performative Utterances and Gender Performance in Shakespeare's Richard III

This article aims to analyze the discourse of cursing and gender performance in Shakespeare's Richard III (1592) through Judith Butler's theory of gender as a performative act in conjunction with J. L. Austin's concept of performative utterances, in order to further a cultural understanding of the beliefs surrounding curses in early modern England. I deploy Richard III as a case study to demonstrate that speech-act theory is applicable in a dramatic text, a context that Austin failed to consider when he theorized illocutionary acts. Since the construction of feminine identities in Richard III is based on performance–in early modern England boy actors impersonated female figures vocally and physically, I argue that curses are gendered feminine despite the fact that cursing women transgress the conventional feminine virtue of silence and despite the cultural belief that curses produce agency of which women are conventionally deprived. As such, the discourse of female cursing can be read as a case of minor literature, a mode of enunciation that challenges and eclipses Richard's discourse, and which emanates from the conventional view that the female curse is a performative speech act that is divinely endorsed. It is an effective means of retaliation, leading to the destruction of villainous figures.

A Prática Espinosana de uma Educação Menor

Resumo: O conceito de educação menor, proposto por Sílvio Gallo em trabalho publicado na Revista Educação & Realidade no ano de 2002, parte de um deslocamento do conceito de literatura menor, criado por Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari. O objetivo deste artigo é identificar Bento de Espinosa (1632-1677), no contexto do século XVII, à prática de certa espécie de educação menor. Tal identificação será construída por meio de um exame de alguns aspectos da biografia do filósofo e de elementos colhidos de sua obra. Demonstra-se que Espinosa, em sua atividade como professor, manteve uma forma de educar não institucionalizada, desterritorializada e rizomática, assim como define o conceito de educação menor.

Heterogeneity and self-referentiality in Things Fall Apart’s proverbs

This article aims to provide a revisiting of the novel Things Fall Apart (1958) by the Nigerian essayist and writer Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) as regards the established notion in postcolonial studies which claims that African literature solely writes back to the western paradigm. The central thesis of this paper is that Achebe’s seminal first novel exhibits self-referential moments as do metafictional texts of the 1990s (Mwangi, 2009) to particularly focus on local nuances as well as colonial criticism. This self-reflexive technique foregrounds aspects of content and form that are especially evident in the use of proverbs. In this sense, we attempt to assess the significance of the internal heteroglossia staged in proverbs which venture unexplored thresholds between the “self” and the “other” and enact a new aesthetics characterized by the umbrella of minor literatures (Deleuze and Guattari [1975] 1986; Bensmaïa, 2017). Proverbs as locus of such hybridization (Bhabha, 1994) and heterogeneity grant a space for the “other” in the Anglophone narrative and also allow the deconstruction of the notion of “other” for African purposes. In a complementary fashion, our concern will be to explore how this heterogeneity is reproduced in the three Spanish translations done by Jorge Sarrió (1966), Fernando Santos (1986) and José Manuel Álvarez Flórez (1997), all of them published in Spain. Accordingly, we approach the analysis of interlingual heterogeneity (Spoturno, 2010) founded on an operation of deterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari, [1975] 1986) by comparing how the Spanish translators have rendered these configurations of heterogeneity and hybridity present in the original proverbs into the translated texts and, at the same time, by accounting for the strategies used for their recreation (Bandia, 2006; Tymoczko, 1999; Murphy, 2010).

From Rice to Apple-Pear Style: An Ecocritical Approach to China's Korean Ethnic Minority Literature

Abstract In Northeast China, China's Korean ethnic group has made the ecological combination of sustainable development with nature by planting rice and apple-pear. This process has been described richly in the literature of Korean ethnic group and the stories about Korean ethnic group. Though the stories used to be considered as manifestation of Korean ethnic immigrant history and the history of their fighting against Japanese in the Anti-Japanese War, they can be designed as the discourse of the process of ecological positive and negative feedback, self-organization, stability domains, and the adaptation in human social systems and ecosystems from ecocritical perspective.

Minority Literature, Performativity, Resistance: The Case of Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysian Writings

This essay demonstrates how non-Malay language writers in Malaysia attempt to subvert the state’s promotion of a single-language (Malay) literature as national literature through the practice of authorial insularity, which is writing within one’s religio-ethnic community. In the case of sinophone literature, this practice has the added significance of refusing submission to a literary heritage (Chinese) that is fundamentally foreign to its cultural identity. The works of Malaysian anglophone writers such as Salleh ben Joned, Che Husna Azhari and K.S. Maniam, as well as Malaysian-born sinophone writer, Ng Kim Chew, will be discussed to illustrate my overarching point.

Entre los rebasamientos de los territorios: literatura menor hacia una poética de los desplazamientos en Deleuze-Guattari

Existe en lo profundo de la obra conjunta Deleuze-Guattari la exigencia de considerarla como una teoría política de la literatura, una política literaria. Los párrafos que prosiguen, en cierta medida responden a dicha exigencia, inscriben la micropolítica de Deleuze-Guattari en una concatenación entre las máquinas revolucionarias y artísticas, en este caso, literarias. Considerando esta conjetura, en el presente artículo nos proponemos abordar las relaciones entre el concepto de literatura menor, las dinámicas espaciales (territoriales) y el orden informativo.

Poezie Wilhelma Przeczka v českých a německých překladech

In this article, we are presenting the work of a Polish poet from a Polish minority the Czech Cieszyn Silesia Wilhelm Przeczek (7. 4. 1936 v Karviná, Czechoslovakia - 10. 7. 2006 Třinec, Czech Republic) into the Czech and German language, as the author’s poetry was published not only in journals but also in books. We understand translation as an expression of intercultural communication, and especially in the area of the literature of a national minority, which is undoubtedly a Polish ethnic group in the Czech Cieszyn Silesia, it is a paramount phenomenon comparing the quality of literary life in the area with majority culture (Czech); as far as translations into German are concerned, it shows the interest of translators in the work of a poet from the Polish national minority, without this witnessing the emanation of a typical Polish soul in Polish literature in the Czech Republic and former Czechoslovakia, but it is evidence that it is fully competitive in total Polish national culture.

Die belyning van 'n kwartet-konfigurasie: Opmerkings oor mineur- en majeurletterkundes

Deleuze en Guattari se konsep van mineurletterkundes het 'n belangrike gegewe in die literatuurteorie van die afgelope aantal dekades geword. Gewoonlik word hierdie konsep met verwysing na drie kern-eienskappe getipeer, naamlik deterritorialisasie, die politieke aard daarvan en die kollektiewe uitdrukkingswaarde wat dit sou veronderstel. Wanneer mineurletterkundes egter teen die agtergrond van Deleuze en Guattari se ander filosofiese werk geïnterpreteer word, blyk dit vinnig dat hierdie konsep veel genuanseerder aangewend behoort te word. In hierdie artikel beoog ek om presies dít te doen: die filosofiese kontekstualisering van mineurletterkundes met betrekking tot die gemeenskaplike oeuvre van beide denkers. Dit geskied deur veral na hulle konseptualisering van groeperings te verwys, oftewel hulle modellering van sosiale strukture en dinamikas in terme van (her)territorialisasie-deterritorialisasie en inhoudsvorm-uitdrukkingsvorm-asse wat mekaar kruis. Die betoog sluit af deur op sekere onderbeligte aspekte van mineurletterkundes te dui en 'n alternatiewe model voor te stel, waarmee mineurletterkundes beter getipeer kan word as die blote verwysing na die drie gesimplifiseerde kern-eienskappe, soos hierbo vermeld.

Enactments of a Minor Inquiry

In this article, we map conditions and enactments for a new plane of inquiry, what Mazzei named a minor inquiry. Informed by our collective thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of a minor literature and its attendant characteristics, deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective assemblage of enunciation, we present the conditions for inquiry on this new plane, provide enactments from our individual projects, and conclude with incitements for escaping the dogma of prescribed method.

On Writing a Comparative Literary History: Delocalizing Minor Literatures in European Languages in the Age of ‘Big Data’

Abstract “Minor literature” is an elusive concept in literary scholarship. Its widespread use stands in sharp contrast to the paucity of its theoretical development, which is limited to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s 1975 seminal book Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure. We claim that a comparative history of minor literatures in European languages – a nonexistent project so far – requires three preliminary steps, namely, conceptual clarification, cross-pollination between comparative literary history and the digital humanities, and a bibliometric analysis of the minor-literature constellation. First, conceptual clarification is needed to show, on the one hand, how Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments on minor literatures significantly differ from those of what they posit as their source (Kafka’s discussion on kleine Literaturen) and, on the other hand, the existence of alternative genealogies. Second, by adhering to a Braudelian definition of comparative history, the massive data needed for addressing the production and reception of (minor) literatures in specific social and cultural contexts would immensely benefit from recourse to digital tools. Third, and as an example of approaching conceptual clarification with digital tools, a quantitative study of the minor-literature constellation must be performed using a key tool of international scholarship (the MLA International Bibliography). In the current paper, we may only provide an introductory survey of these three fields and, therefore, the results are tentative and further research is needed.

Becoming-minoritarian in Paco Bezerra’s Grooming and El señor Ye ama los dragones

Marginalization is at the core of Paco Bezerra’s work. The dramatic themes explored in his plays are varied, ranging from molestation, feminism, ecoterrorism, and immigration to bullying and many others. However, on another level throughout his oeuvre, there is always another element that stems from the marginalization aspect embedded in the dramatic conflict: a far more insidious and entrenched rotten core that affects everything and everyone on stage. While most of his characters are clearly beleaguered on the grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, or a combination of several biases that act unabashedly on the surface, there is also an unrelenting criticism toward a higher form of political oppression or authoritarianism that pervades each play. In this article, I examine Bezerra’s Grooming and El señor Ye ama los dragones as enunciative acts of oppositional discursive strategy to show how the marginalization process, at the two levels sketched above, occurs. By analyzing the plays under Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minoritarian, minor literature and becoming-minoritarian, we can witness how marginalization functions to rupture the fragile order in Bezerra’s plays at both levels. Hereby we can see that the playwright has created works that belong to a minor language as defined by Deleuze and Guattari. Examining the move from the particular issue at hand, the dramatic motor, to some larger unspecified phenomena, suggests a potentially troubling forecast for Spanish society.

‘Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter’: an unfinished response

This brief response to a symposium discusses some of the themes sounded by Oishik Sircar (pathos, minor literatures, and benign neglect), Adil Hasan Khan (Quixotism in international law from the antechambers of history of interregnums) and Debolina Dutta (relatedness as a virtue of care and responsibility in doing legal pedagogy, and social activism).

A Practical Proposal to Use Venuti’s ‘Minoritizing Translation’ for Native American Literature

In a recent article, I argued that Native American literature, as a minor literature according to Deleuze and Guattari, is a great candidate for being translated in a minoritizing way, as proposed by Venuti. Since this literature is very popular in Spain –13 translations published in the 2010s–, I analysed the most recent translations of Sherman Alexie’s, Louise Erdrich’s and N. Scott Momaday’s novels and concluded that they were aimed at entertainment, at linguistic and syntactic fluency, and at over-refined stylistics. This kind of translation means, hence, the erasure of indigenous cultural and literary aspects from the target texts and the hiding of the socio-political implications of the source texts. 
 In the present article, I insist on the idea that Venuti’s ‘minoritizing translation’ can be adapted to attend to the minor literature features of American Indian books and, consequently, to produce culturally and socio-politically engaged translations. After revising Venuti’s proposal and Tymoczko’s criticism on it, I present a brief description of the translations of works by Alexie, Erdrich, Momaday and Zitkala-Ša, all published during the 2010s. Then, I detail the precise strategies that would help to emphasize the specific characteristics of this literature, and I compare passages from the published translations with my alternative minoritizing translations.

Violence and resistance: Joyce Lussu’s minority revolution in trans-lation

This article explores the theme of violence in the autobiographical work of Joyce Salvadori Lussu, an Italian partisan, political activist, writer and translator, who experienced many wars and violent conflicts throughout her life: the Great War; the Second World War; the anti-imperialistic struggles; and the protests of 1968. As a premise, the author will reconsider the philosophical notions of violence and force in relation to the concept of resistance, by first situating all these categories within a physical sphere. Second, the author proposes a rethinking of the subject of violence from a female perspective, by studying Joyce Lussu’s theoretical discourse about women and war. Therefore, through the analysis of images of violence gathered from Lussu’s literary work, the author interprets the essential role of women as ‘resistants’ as well as bearers of pacifist values. Finally, the author uses the category of minority revolution, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, to underline Lussu’s political commitment on the side of renegades through her activity as a translator of minor literature. The methodological perspective adopted aims at challenging the contemporary domination of the anti-humanist discourse, by endorsing the secular values of Humanism, reemerged and theorized in Italy between the 1930s and 1960s.