The spaces of violence
By: James R. Giles.
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Tuscaloosa
Language: eng
Number of pages: 209
ISBN-13: 9780817315023
Subjects: American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Violence in literature.; Space (Architecture) in literature.; Space and time in literature.; Personal space in literature.
Description: "James R. Giles examines 10 contemporary American novels for the unique ways they explore violence and space as interrelated phenomena. These stories take place in settings as diverse as small towns, college campuses, suburbs, the brokerage houses and luxury apartments of Wall Street, football stadiums, Appalachian hills, and America's no-man's-land of Greyhound bus stations and highways. Violence, Giles finds, is mythological and ritualistic in many of these novels, whereas it is treated as systemic and naturalistic in others. Giles locates each of the novels he studies on a continuum from the mythological to the naturalistic and argues that they represent a "fourthspace" at the margins of physical, social, and psychological space, a territory at the cultural borders of the mainstream. These textual spaces are so saturated with violence that they suggest little or no potential for change and affirmation and are as degraded as the physical, social, and mental spaces from which they emerge. A concluding chapter extends the focus of The Spaces of Violence to texts by Jane Smiley, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, and Chuck Palahniuk, who treat the destructive effects of violence on family structures."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Violence and space; title: Discovering fourthspace in Appalachia : Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark and Child of God; title: Russell Banks's Affliction : "all those solitary dumb angry men"; title: Of vultures, eyeballs, and parrots : Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle; title: The myth of the Boatright Men : Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina; title: Playing for death : Don Delillo's End Zone; title: Drifting through Urantia : greyhound space in Denis Johnson's Angels; title: The return of John Smith : Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer; title: "The Battle of Bob Hope" and "The Great Elephant Zap" : Robert Stone's Dog; title: Soldiers; title: "I hope you didn't go into raw space without me": Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho; title: Violence and family structures.