Terror and the Arts

This book advances the argument that the arts, from film and literature to painting and comics, offer qualitatively different readings of terror and trauma that endeavor to resist the exploitation and perpetuation of violence.

"Terror and the Arts vividly explores the fractures and paradoxes of contemporary politics from the viewpoint of aesthetic experience. Be it visual, literary, poetic or musical, art allows us an insight into the terrorized present that can perhaps help in framing it differently, criticizing and avoiding the automatic response of aggression and retaliation. Whoever thinks that the present confronts us with the need to re-think and re-name contemporary violence must read this challenging collection of essays." - Adriana Cavarero, author of Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence

"Terror mobilizes the arts, visual and narrative, as well as their scholarly study. Not only, as can be expected, for the struggle against terrorism or for working through the trauma. In surveying the spaces between general human response to terror and defined political engagement, the insightful and often controversial chapters of this volume also raise more disconcerting questions: about complexities of judgment in the artistic processing of terror, about the possible competition between the arts and the acts that raise the threshold for subversion and shock, about the ways in which the arts can slide or be coerced into normalizing terror or furthering the issues promoted by terrorist groups or regimes, about the arts entrapment in the cultural circulation under the sign of terror, and about the ways in which the arts, politicized by terror, inevitably implicate their audience. The book opens new intellectual vistas, rejecting comfortable attitudes." - Leona Toker, Professor of English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

"How can cataclysmic traumas such as 9/11 or appalling spectacles such as Abu Ghraib be made the objects of art, and what political value might they have? By reading the arts politically, Terror and the Arts demonstrates with great clarity and insight the vitally important role of the arts in imaginatively working through the unspeakable violence of our age." - Mark Freeman, College of the Holy Cross and author of Rewriting the Self

Autorentext

MATTI HYVÄRINEN is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow, Department of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Tampere, Finland.
LISA MUSZYNSKI is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Social Science History, University of Helsinki, Finland and an associate member of the Politics and the Arts research team at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change.

Inhalt
PART I: VISUALIZING TERROR The Implicated Spectator: From Manet to Botero; F. Möller Art in the Age of Terror: The Israeli Case; D. Arieli-Horowitz The Aura of Terror?; K. Lindroos PART II: FICTIONALIZING TERROR Dostoyevsky on Terror and the Question of the West; M. Heller To this Side of Good and Evil: Primo Levi as a Truth-Teller; T. Parvikko Narrating Trauma? Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance; K. Korhonen Too much Terror? J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and the Circulation of Trauma; M. Hyvärinen PART III: GOVERMENTAL TERROR Dictators and Dictatorships: Art and Politics in Romania and Chile (19741989); C. Preda Inciting Mental Terror as Effective Governmental Control: Chinese Propaganda Posters During the Cultural Revolution (19661976); M. Valjakka The Sweet Hereafter of Machiavelli and Weber: Discussing Community and Responsibility as Political-ethical Criteria; J. Franzé PART IV: THE THEORY OF TERROR The Violence of Lying; O. Guaraldo Terrorized by Sound? Foucault on Terror, Resistance, and Sonorous Art; L. Siisiäinen