Senseless Violence Research Articles

Rejecting the Radical New Left: Transformations in Japanese Social Movements

After a disastrous period of New Left political violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, followed by two decades of abeyance, Japan has experienced a renewed era of social movement activity since the 1990s. These new movements explicitly seek to avoid contamination by the earlier period, even when their participants know little about it except for fear perpetuated by media portrayals of senseless violence. We analyze ethnographic accounts of contemporary groups engaged in collective action, ranging from small informal groups in Japan’s invisible civil society; groups trying to mobilize laborers who fall outside Japan’s traditional enterprise unions; and groups reviving and revitalizing older movement networks to deal with new threats; to new right-wing challengers and their counter-movements; and those making innovative use of cultural resources. They all seek alternatives to earlier social movements that engaged in political violence, by creating very different organizational structures and relations to ideology, relying on social media for communication, and developing new forms of collective action. They foreground cultural and expressive repertoires, and seek to establish the movement as a place of personal and social belonging. As was true of the New Left social movements in the mid-20th century, these new groups are closely attuned to movement developments around the world, even as they craft their responses to specific historical conditions in Japan.

An Endless Capacity for Dissembling: Representing Teenage Girls on the American Stage from The Children's Hour through If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka

One day in 2018, I arrived at Playwrights Horizons in New York City excited to see a new play by Lindsey Ferrentino called This Flat Earth. I did not know much about the story aside from the fact that it had teenage actors playing teenager characters, but I quickly realized that it was about two teens trying to make sense of a recent mass shooting event as their school. The most striking part of this experience was watching Ella Kennedy Davis playing a thirteen-year-old white girl named Julie who takes out her anger, grief, and confusion about this senseless violence on those around her. Davis spent much of the play on the emotional limits of anguish, screaming, crying, and shaking to the point where she continued to do so throughout the curtain call. Both my discomfort with the actor's obvious distress, and my genuine dislike for the whiny, sad, one-dimensional role—whose main characteristic is her ignorance of previous school shootings—were enough to distract me from the play itself. But what created this distancing effect? I first thought of Bert O. States's phenomenological observation that children onstage often break our illusion of the theatrical world, but I noted that my phenomenological response was distinctly different from what I feel when I see children acting onstage. Instead of wondering if the actor understood the play she was in, I instead feared she understood all too well.

The Sense in Senseless Violence: Male Reproductive Strategy and the Modern Sexual Marketplace as Contributors to Violent Extremism

The Sense in Senseless Violence: Male Reproductive Strategy and the Modern Sexual Marketplace as Contributors to Violent Extremism

The Evil of Humanity in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and “The Summer People”

Centered around the evil of humanity concerning backward customs, this paper analyze the indifference and hypocrisy among villagers and even their relatives, as well as their blind adherence to tradition. Base on the previous researches, the further scrutiny of the characters both in “The Lottery” and “The Summer People” by Shirley Jackson provide us with profound reflections. Through the dramatic events of senseless violence and behavior in people’s own lives, Jackson’s stories urge people to reflect on the ugliness of humanity described by the writer, and appeal to people in contemporary society to abandon bad customs so as to transform the evil of humanity into the good of humanity for we should live in a civilized and democratic society.

Perpetua, Felicity, and the Paradox of Horror

The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity is one of the most well-known texts from the earliest Christian centuries. However, at its heart lies a paradox. The story describes the arrest, imprisonment, torture, and violent deaths of two young women. If events such as these were to happen right in front of us, most of us would turn away. Our sense of fear and horror might be magnified by a sense that we could also become victims of this kind of senseless violence. However, this literary account has held the attention and admiration of Christians since the third century. There has been an abiding desire to enter into this story, to live it (at least allegedly) through the eyes of one of the victims, and to relive and celebrate it through various cultic practices. How can we explain this? This paper explores the psychological appeal of the Passion through the lens of horror theory and what has been called the paradox of horror, associated with the paradox of painful art. By applying insights from horror theory, the paper explores the irresistible draw of a story full of elements that should provoke revulsion.

Cocks on Dunghills – Wollstonecraft and Gouges on the Women’s Revolution

Abstract While many historians and philosophers have sought to understand the ‘failure’ of the French Revolution to thrive and to avoid senseless violence, very few have referred to the works of two women philosophers who diagnosed the problems as they were happening. This essay looks at how Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges theorised the new tyranny that grew out of the French Revolution, that of ‘petty tyrants’ who found themselves like ‘cocks on a dunghill’ able to wield a new power over those less fortunate than themselves. Both offer diagnoses and prognoses that revolve around education. Wollstonecraft argues that a revolution that is not backed by a previous education of the people is bound to result in chaos and violence. Such education, however, must be slow, and it necessitates the reform of the institutions that most shape the public’s character. A revolution, perforce, is fast, and it often takes several years, or even generations before the spirit of the reforms finds itself implemented into new institutions. Olympe de Gouges shares Wollstonecraft’s worry and she observes that the men who were once dominated quickly become tyrants themselves unless their moral character is already virtuous. But the state of being dominated leaves little room for virtue; hence, newly minted citizens need to be educated in order not to replicate the reign of tyranny onto other. Gouges suggests that the answer to the difficulty she and Wollstonecraft highlighted was to educate the people where they could be found: on the streets, or, where they could easily and willingly be gathered: in theatres. By helping organise revolutionary festivals, highlighting the ways in which citizens could be virtuous, and writing plays to awaken their virtue, and proposing a reform of the theatre, so that the production of such plays would be possible, Gouges offered a plan for the civic education of French citizens in the immediate aftermaths of the Revolution. Unfortunately, the chaos she and Wollstonecraft had sought to remedy, led by the cocks or petty tyrants, ensured that they were unable to see through their plans, with Wollstonecraft having to leave Paris and Gouges being sent to the guillotine.

Three Lives Changed Forever….

The summer heat was blistering.It was my night to cover trauma anesthesiaThe pandemic and George Floyd andsocial uprising and sirens filling the air.The tension was a thick cloud expanding for blocks,hovering over the trauma unit at Cedar Sinai.Good citizens in the wrong place, at the wrong time.victims of violence and chaos.Three lives changing forever.One was thirty-three years old -risking his life “to protect and to serve.” His actions met with strife.Dear officer, thank you for your service.Each day you leave your familyto protect strangers from harm.My utmost respect for our men in blue.A bottle crashed through the cruiser window,striking his head.Blood compressed the brain.Emergency brain surgery was neededto save his life.The skull was openedAnd the blood was drained.The surgery was completed,but what was the verdict?He opened his eyesand squeezed my hand.He moved his legsand said his name.He knew date, time, and place,he was himself with no damage done.Then another. Twenty-five years oldMale, six foot, three inches tall withlight brown African American skin.His lung, esophagus, and hepatic vein all ruptured – aninnocent victim of a stray bullet.The smell of blood filled my nostrilsAnd I was gripped with fear that he would die.My mind was racing as to what to do.Life-saving decisions I had to make.I gave medications and blood transfusions.I took a deep breath,no, it can’t be!What’s his name I shouted,the nurse responded, “trauma 999.”My heart was pounding,I could not think,what would I tell his mom?It would break her heart.With a trembling handI pulled back the coversto look at his face.I was overwhelmed with reliefit was not my son.And by the grace of God,we went on to save his life.The night was intense.Twelve hours of trauma,and three lives changed forever.Three lives changed forever...These two acts of senseless violence occurred in Los Angeles, California, in the wake of the death of George Floyd. They were admitted to Cedars Sinai Medical Center that night where I was the trauma anesthesiologist who took care of them. These events pierced my soul like a double-edged sword. Entangled with the relief that my son was safe was the heartache I felt for these two innocent men and their families. I bowed my head and thanked God that good had triumphed over evil tonight

The Skin of Our Teeth, Everyman Theatre, Baltimore, Maryland

<i>The Skin of Our Teeth</i>, Everyman Theatre, Baltimore, Maryland

The Human Cost of Conflict. Greek Tragedy on the Trojan War

This paper discusses the human cost of conflict as depicted in the ancient Greek tragedies dealing with the various phases of the Trojan War. Aeschylus’, Sophocles’, and Euripides’ tragedies do not depict battle scenes or physical injuries of combatants and other victims of the senseless violence, but instead concentrate on the collateral damage of the War suffered by the combatants and other victims. Then as now, war shatters families and tests bonds of loyalty to the extreme, with many of the victims being women and children. The tragedies present the familial collapse, resulting not only from the physical destruction of the city of Troy, but also from the damage done to the fabric of society when normative moral codes are subjugated to the needs of war. Following the order of plays in terms of chronological sequence of events depicted, rather than dates when they were performed, the paper highlights how the human suffering began from before the actual fighting started, and continues long after the fall of Troy, as the traumatic acts of revenge persist in the next generation of the combatants’ families. While most of the Trojan War tragedies concentrate either on the suffering of the Greeks or the Trojans, in Euripides’ Andromache we see that the War’s survivors on both sides continue to suffer from the War’s after effects. Through a systematic analysis of the plays’ themes the article presents a chilling picture of the human cost of the Trojan War, with the horrifying suffering caused by war, sadly remaining relevant to many victims of conflict in the present day.

Making Sense of “Senseless Violence”: Thoughts on Agrarian Elites and Collective Violence during “Reconstruction” in South Africa and the American South

AbstractKey moments of the American Civil War and the 1899–1902 South African War and their tragic immediate aftermaths remain powerful features of national memory in both countries. Over the past century, vengeful politicians and ideologues in both have transformed them into formidable stock-in-trade. Second-, third-, and fourth-hand accounts of the alleged churlish manner of the victorious armies, especially soldiers of African descent, were made into combustible timber for reactionary political campaigns. The perceived cruel turns of fate have made their way into literature, stage, and screen. The two wars afforded people of various races and social conditions opportunity to act upon their conceptions of a just society, albeit amid terrible carnage and loss. They also underscored the permanence of the industrial transformation of both countries. In the decades following these two wars most of the black and white agrarian populations discovered that state and agrarian elites had cynically manipulated and then extinguished their aspirations. Most often, for black agrarians, violence was the preferred instrument to pursue desired outcomes. Reconstruction in the American South was a paradox. The Civil War emancipated the slaves but left the entire South, especially upland cotton regions, economically backward. In Louisiana, especially, politicized violence to coerce black labor was pervasive. After the South African War, white violence against rural black people was widespread. Lord Milner’s Reconstruction Administration was more concerned to bring South Africa’s gold mines back into production than to stem the violence. The low-intensity violence of the postwar countryside became the backland route to apartheid.

Pretty in pink: David Antonio Cruz’s portrait of the florida girls

Roused by the deaths of five African American transgender women in Florida in 2018, artist David Antonio Cruz intervenes in inaccurate media reports about these murders. Painting portrait of the florida girls in 2019, his diptych of significant scale and palette, confronts this senseless violence and challenges sensationalized coverage. This article centralizes his work arguing for the ways in which Cruz innovates transgender of color visibility through a queer of color critiquing of the portrait form and concerted use of a ‘blacktino’ optic. Ruminating on the combined tragedies of gun violence at Pulse nightclub and serial murder of trans femmes, Cruz’s work interrogates the posthumous transgender image with a reversal of digital source material and bodily logics in pose and countenance. By turning to the transnational crossroads shaping these communities’ shared horrors, central Florida, Cruz activates his audience with a sense of urgency in the persuasive power of pink.

Perpetual Motion Machine: Refugee Experience in Zeyn Joukhadar's Fantasy Adventure, The Map of Salt and Stars

Perpetual Motion Machine:Refugee Experience in Zeyn Joukhadar's Fantasy Adventure, The Map of Salt and Stars Noah Bogdonoff (bio) Perpetual Motion Machine: Refugee Experience in Zeyn Joukhadar's Fantasy Adventure, The Map of Salt and Stars Noah Bogdonoff New York, NY: Atria Books, 2018. 384 pages. $16.91 What place does imagination have in the midst of a harrowing refugee story? Zeyn Joukhadar asks this surprising—and surprisingly difficult—question over and over in his debut novel, The Map of Salt and Stars. There is no single answer; the book, laced as it is with wisdom, does not reduce itself to a single moral or a straightforward conclusion. Instead, it calls upon the reader to look head-on at the emotional realities of growing up in the thrall of senseless violence. The novel tells two stories. In one narrative, we follow Nour, a young Syrian American woman, as she moves with her family to Homs, Syria after her father's death and is subsequently hurled into a world of violence and displacement when her new home is destroyed in the Syrian Civil War. In the other, we witness the mythic adventure of Rawiya, another young woman, as she leaves her home on the Strait of Gibraltar and disguises herself as a boy in order to seek her fortune by helping the legendary cartographer Abu Abd Muhammad Allah al-Idrisi assemble the largest, most accurate map in the world. Technically, the latter narrative is framed within the former—Nour knows the story of Rawiya from her father and recounts it as a way of keeping his memory alive. In this way, Rawiya's adventure is subordinate to Nour's forced migration; it functions most obviously as a metaphor and a coping mechanism. But as Nour and Rawiya make their way across the exact same landscapes, marveling at the same constellations, each facing their own elemental dangers, a wonderful leveling begins to occur. One has the sense that these women, separated by time alone, are in fact acting upon each other. Rawiya teaches Nour how to hold tightly to her sense of self as the world grows more and more dangerous around her. And Nour, as the teller of the tale, ushers Rawiya into adulthood. Indeed, as the story progresses, we are introduced to elements that seem more likely to have sprung from Nour's sensibilities rather than her father's—the subtleties and sensations of Rawiya's growing crush on the poet Khaldoun, for example, or the emotional burden of hiding her gender as a means of self-protection. In this way, The Map of Salt and Stars asks us to consider the impact of who tells stories. What is gained, what is elided? Still, one could be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at the idea of a novel which invites comparisons between a horrific refugee experience and a rollicking fantasy-adventure story. In Joukhadar's hands, however, the juxtaposition does not denigrate nor commodify the pain of displacement, but rather asks us to look directly at it through the eyes of a child. The legend of Rawiya is not an analogy; it is a lodestar, a guide that Nour can turn to when she needs the sort of courage and resourcefulness that no child should ever be asked to demonstrate. This is not, ultimately, a children's story; it is a child's story, and it encompasses the capaciousness of that child's perspective. The Map of Salt and Stars is an exquisitely constructed novel, and Joukhadar's meticulous work is evident in almost every aspect of the story. Parallels between the two narratives, both large and small, abound: Both protagonists are fatherless, and both protect themselves with their fathers' parting gifts (Rawiya's is literal—a slingshot which serves over and over as a protective force—and Nour's is metaphorical—the legend of Rawiya itself). Both protagonists are guided by mapmakers, and both mapmakers must eventually trust their charges to find [End Page 274] their own ways home. Bakr, al-Idrisi's other apprentice, struggles to overcome his self-centeredness and materialism; Zahra, Nour's sister, struggles with the same. These overlaps never feel forced, however—rather...

The habitat of crime – Random Acts of Senseless Violence from the criminological perspective

The habitat of crime – Random Acts of Senseless Violence from the criminological perspective

Youth Engagement in Nigerian Politics: Age and Gender Differentials (as Perceived by Ijebu-Ode Community)

The importance of youth involvement in political and developmental processes of society can hardly be exaggerated. However, despite the large percentage of young people in Nigeria and the historical importance of intergenerational continuity with an emphasis on national identity, very little is really known about the degree of youth engagement in the country’s politics. Therefore, this study, in the form of a descriptive survey, analyzes gender and age differentials of youth participation in Nigerian politics. A random sampling technique was used in selecting 200 youths from 5 political wards (40 from each ward) in Ijebu-Ode Local Government Area of Ogun State. Additionally, a self-structured questionnaire was designed and used for data collection, while a t-test and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were employed to test the three hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The study revealed no significant gender difference ( t = 1.56, P &gt; 0.05) or age difference ( t = 1.44, P &gt; 0.05) among the young population of Nigeria actively engaged in politics in the country. Conclusively, the authors recommend that efforts should be geared towards fighting illiteracy and unemployment in the country, as these are known to be main reasons for vandalism, senseless violence, anarchism, racketeering, and cultism among the Nigerian youth, while realistic political organizations under control and leadership of the young population should be formed.

The Rogue as an Artist in Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers

This article explores Eli Sisters as a reinvigorated rogue who finds his artistic calling in Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, published in 2011. With the help of insights from narratology and genre theory, the article provides a textual analysis of Eli’s discourse, perspective and behaviour. Eli casts a critical light on the senseless violence, unbridled greed, ecological devastation, and hyper-masculinity inherent to America’s Frontier myth. As a reinvigorated rogue, he raises questions about what it means to be human and reflects upon morality. With hindsight, the rogue as an artist creates a generically hybrid narrative that parodically imitates and transforms the genre conventions of the Western and the picaresque tale. The article also draws attention to the power that Eli assigns to women in a story about male heroic conquest. These include otherworldly female figures from classical mythology and the brothers’ mother.

Tanure Ojaide and Youth Empowerment in the Niger Delta: The Inkle Loom Design Paradigm

Tanure Ogaide is a socially conscious poet. Due to his sensitivity, social commitment, and political engagement, his poetry delineates ecological spoliation, political marginalization, economic dispossession and the denigration of Niger Delta people. In addition to this role of the poet as a social critic, he proffers solutions to the problems that plague his society, especially his native Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Hence, this interdisciplinary paper examines the poet’s warning against laziness and senseless violence and the need for the youths to attain economic empowerment and financial independence through individual creativity, talent and skill. It pays particular attention to the poet’s portraiture of the loom and the significance of clothes and clothing materials, using inkle weaving as a creative art that can promote wealth and job creation, thereby minimizing poverty, discontent, unrest and violence in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Inkle weaving is an ancient hand manipulative art. Inkle looms equipment is for weaving strips or bands of warp-faced fabric. The loom, like Navajo back-strap and inkle are portable, accessible and are used to produce fascinating strong bands such as guitar and camera straps, colorful shoelaces, belts, fashion accessories and to aesthetically enhance clothing. However, fragmented knowledge of its production process is known in most tertiary institutions and in medium scale textile industries. The experimental research method has been adopted and it is essential to promote weaving efficiency, economic empowerment and self-reliance amongst Niger Delta youths. This study holds that knowledge of inkle weaving technique will provide substitute woven fabrics for art practitioners; encourage creativity and innovation, and entrepreneurship practice. It will also solve socioeconomic challenges and manpower needs by building youths into responsible citizens with skills in handling inkle tools, materials and equipment for an improved indigenous textile industry.Key Words: inkle loom, youth empowerment, Niger Delta, strip, warp faced, warp, weft, shuttle, heddle

Tolstoy and the Idea of Revolution: Enlightenment Project and Prosopopoeia of Life

The reasonable human nature appears in the Enlightenment’s philosophy as a reduction of the human being and its manifestations to a complex of natural impulses when all former norms of perception, reflections, inclinations, actions and the moral principles, which lie in their basis, are canceled in the free human self-experimenting. The monarchy idea depreciates when its citizens turn in the public good’s proponents on the basis of a blind republican consent about the egoism’s limitation (Robespierre) and a prosopo-peia of freedom that gives to a nation the self-government illusion. The reconsideration of the revolutionary moment as a self-affirmation of romantic spirit is connected for Tolstoy with the “world will” novel poetics opening evolutionary moment in the affective and reflexive dynamics of the hero’s consciousness, the limiting witness of the narrator and the author’s horizon of progressive movement to the historical process’s purpose that creates the belief in the need of coexistence with other participating consciousnesses. The revolutionary and evolutionary reflection of Tolstoy is related to the monoteis-tic prosopopoeia of divine kenosis. From an artistic representation of signifying articulations of the evolutionary world the teacher’s reflection of Tolstoy is born. For Tolstoy revolution is the moment of the senseless violence aiming to eliminate the common evil of the world. The conceptual basis of literary culture as an art and ideological formatting of reactive consciousnesses for Tolstoy is an infinite aspiration to the human self-limitation.

P078: If you build it they will come: use of live actor patients during a hospital-wide mass casualty simulation exercise to garner institutional commitment to long term drills

Introduction: BACKGOUND In the modern era of terrorism and senseless violence, it is essential that hospital staff have expertise in implementation of a mass casualty incident (MCI) plan. OBJECTIVES 1. To assess current gaps in implementation of an academic urban hospital code orange plan using live simulation and tabletop exercise. 2. To identify and educate front-line staff to champion a hospital-wide MCI plan. INNOVATION Historically, in order to limit resource utilization and impact on patient care, disaster response training of front-line staff involved tabletop exercises only. The tenets of experiential learning suggest that learner engagement through realistic active practice of skills achieves deeper uptake of new knowledge. We enhanced the traditional tabletop approach through novel use of live actor patients presenting to an academic, urban emergency department (ED) during a hospital-wide MCI simulation. Methods: To assess the current code orange plan, an interprofessional, committee comprising expert leaders in trauma, emergency preparedness, emergency medicine and simulation integrated tabletop and live simulation to stage a MCI based on a mock incident at a new subway station. ED staff, the trauma team and champions from medicine, surgery and critical care participated along with support departments such as Patient Flow, Patient Transport, Environmental Services and the Hospital Emergency Operations Centre. Ten live actor patients and eight virtual patients presented to the ED. The exercise occurred in situ in the ED. Other participating departments conducted tabletop exercises and received live actor patients. Results: CURRICULUM Staff decanted the ED and other participating units using their current knowledge of hospital code orange policy. Live and virtual patients were triaged and managed according to severity of injuries. Live actor patients were assessed, intervened and transported to their designated unit. Virtual patients were managed through verbal discussion with the simulation controllers. An ED debrief took place using a plus/delta approach followed by a hospital-wide debrief. Conclusion: CONCLUSION An interprofessional hospital-wide MCI simulation revealed important challenges such as communication, command and control and patient-tracking . The exercise ignited enthusiasm and commitment to longitudinal practice and improvement for identified gaps.

A Record of Our Debts by Laura Hendrix Ezell

Reviewed by: A Record of Our Debts by Laura Hendrix Ezell Jamie Utphall Laura Hendrix Ezell. A Record of Our Debts. Moon City Press, 2016. The 2016 winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award, Laura Hendrix Ezell’s debut short story collection takes place in a gothic post-apocalyptic South, in which a cast of feral characters grapple with deprivation, loss, and monstrosity. Before each story, a passage labeled “Heresay” tangles readers’ perception, creating a grotesque web in which the boundaries between narrative and myth, and the real and the unreal, dissolve murkily across the interconnected stories. Presenting a battered, sometimes dreadful version of humanity, Ezell’s collection explores both the heartbreak and redemption of characters left savagely abandoned in decay’s wake. The collection’s characters struggle to survive in a rural wasteland, in which food, resources and even fertility are scarce, yet the horrors Ezell intimates most deftly are those that could affect any of us, at any time or place. In the magical realist story “Flight,” Rachel gives birth to Isabel, an “owlish child,” who “shredded the bottom of the blanket she was wrapped in, all the while shrieking and slapping her wings against herself, the sounds of it like a far-off storm of locusts fighting the wind.” Such Hitchcockian descriptions demonstrate Ezell’s ability to defamiliarize the commonplace anxieties of parenting to reveal a mother’s shameful fear of never truly understanding her own daughter. Later, the story leaps in time to describe Rachel’s concern for Isabel’s imminent coming of age, which Ezell symbolizes as a premonition in the form of a giant owl: “Rachel saw it as a hole swallowing the uppermost branches of the tree—a passage of sorts, the hungry, open mouth to a darker world.” As Isabel approaches womanhood, Rachel vacillates between grieving the loss of her baby girl while confronting the profound disgust she feels towards this foreign, unnatural creature. Ezell portrays how Rachel must come to terms with the realization that her offspring is entirely different from herself. For Rachel, as perhaps for many parents, it seems extraordinary for children to grow up, to refuse protection, and stretch their wings beyond their parents’ reach. Thus, while Ezell’s landscape is something freakish and sometimes macabre, her characters’ battles with such fundamental human conflicts reveal their recognizable humanity. However, Ezell also portrays the darker, bestial side of humankind, especially in the collection’s titular story. In “A Record of Our Debts,” the towns-people of Abel blame a young disabled child for the curse of “the damps,” a mysterious illness that leaves their community “wobbling and mumbling,” and subject to torrents of animal rage. The story is narrated sympathetically by Selma’s unnamed older sister, who witnesses not only the townspeople’s,’ but also her own parents,’ desire to turn on her sister. Ezell portrays Selma suffering from “blood fits” and eating wood with her “legs splayed, kicking, swinging...teeth grinding, shiny wet lips, and... dark little mouth chewing hard,” yet Ezell’s narrator notices Abel’s townspeople aren’t all that different: “some people pretend it’s only her...Crazy Selma, they’ll say, and laugh. And then they’ll go back to chewing the bloody skin around their fingernails, hoping nobody notices who else is sick right along with her.” In a scene reminiscent of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the townsmen arrive for Semla, “wild past fearing guns, or needing them.” The narrator notices her best friend Lon Henry, an eleven-year-old boy with a twisted leg, has joined the mob. But Lon convinces the older men to retreat. Ezell’s rhyming disability across characters demonstrates the irony of bigotry. The real tragedy of the story is not its senseless violence but how such atrocity is paid as necessary tender. But for the narrator, these reparations bring no relief. Thus, Ezell’s telltale strength is juxtaposing the sinister landscape against the wisdom and humanity of her narrators. In addition to Ezell’s evocative rendition of the horrors of the post-apocalyptic gothic South, she [End Page 28] also illustrates the unlikely places in which grief and hope tangle and persist...

Nouveaux entretiens avec Maryse Condé: écrivain et témoin de son temps par Françoise Pfaff

Reviews 209 how in the face of senseless violence the picaresque pragmatics of “getting by” pervaded the Great War literary and pictorial imaginary, and how texts refashioned an erstwhile Spanish narrative mode known for its blend of epic “adventure time” and routine “everyday time” (19) and for its peripatetic working-class or peasant protagonist, who encounters an array of human types while remaining a non-entity or“everyman”(24). Accessible and witty, this exploration of French cultural memory does much to refocus our understanding of la guerre de 14–18 by retrieving the nimble-spirited ingenuity that sustained French society until 1930, when pessimistic narratives of heroic victimization displaced it. Johns Hopkins University (MD) Derek Schilling Pfaff, Françoise. Nouveaux entretiens avec Maryse Condé: écrivain et témoin de son temps. Paris: Karthala, 2016. ISBN 978-2-8111-1707-8. Pp. 200. Françoise Pfaff’s 1993 Entretiens avec Maryse Condé introduced the author to the public at a crucial time in her career and presented an exploration of the relationship between Condé’s life and her work as writer, academic and activist. Nouveaux entretiens updates readers on Condé’s trajectory since then, as she reflects on events that have transformed the world she engages in her work and reviews with Pfaff her publications since 1993 in an engaging give-and-take style that testifies to their twentyyear friendship. Some topics were seen in the first volume—the writer’s beginnings; views on feminism, the Black Diaspora, and racism. Drawing on interviews since 1993, Pfaff invites Condé to elaborate on other questions, like her relationship to the French language and what she meant by the statement “j’écris en Maryse Condé” (64). They discuss the intertextuality in her works, her ironic style, and a concept favored by Condé,“le cannibalisme littéraire”(60–61). Some views remain the same. Condé is as provocative as ever, nudging her readers to question both their view of the world and the one they think Condé is presenting. Other views have changed. The passage of time has taught her that a writer does not have to travel to discover human truths and has led her to query:“Est-ce qu’un voyage intérieur n’est pas aussi valable qu’un voyage physique?” (39). She is also less critical of her native Antilles and more realistic in her relationship with Africa. Condé’s approach to the world has not changed, but the world has, and current events have changed her approach to literature: “Maintenant, il faut concevoir une littérature qui ait la puissance de la vie sans tomber dans des travers de journalistes” (24). Globalization is less abstract to her as she considers writing about the young Martinican woman killed by a Malian terrorist on the streets of Paris (22– 23). Condé is no less politically active, but her activism has evolved into a passion for writing stories for children: “Je crois que c’est un reste de militantisme!” (158). Discussing with Condé her novels and children’s stories published since 1993, Pfaff provides both an overview of these works and insight into what inspired them. As Madeleine Cottenet-Hage writes in the introduction, Pfaff’s questions reveal a deep understanding of Condé’s writings and of her unique voice in world literature. This volume introduces new readers to an artist and activist who feels deeply about the human condition; readers who know Condé’s work will enjoy being in the company of her voice again. Wake Forest University (NC) Sarah Barbour Picherit, Hervé G. Le livre des écorchés: Proust, Céline et la Grande Guerre. Paris: CNRS, 2016. ISBN 978-2-271-08995-3. Pp. 368. Comment Proust et Céline,qui furent contemporains,répondirent-ils aux épreuves personnelles, familiales et sociales qui traversèrent leurs vies? C’est par cette question que ce livre rapproche deux écrivains qui semblent avoir peu en commun. Dans la première partie, Picherit définit tout d’abord le concept de “peau”, qui sert de fil conducteur à sa lecture. Cette “peau” est un imaginaire qui enveloppe, protège et structure un individu, une famille ou une communauté et que diverses catastrophes peuvent “écorcher...