Victims and the Postmodern Narrative or Doing Violence to the Body

Victims and the Postmodern Narrative suggests that reading and writing about literature are ways to gain an ethical understanding of how we live in the world. Postmodern narrative is an important way to reveal and discuss who are society's victims, inviting the reader to become one with them. A close reading of fiction by Toni Morrison, Patrick Suskind, D.M. Thomas, Ian McEwan and J.M. Coetzee reveals a violence imposed on gender, race and the body-politic. Such violence is not new to the postmodern world, but merely reflects Western culture's religious traditions, as the author demonstrates through a reading of stories from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament.

Inhalt
General Editor's Preface; David Jasper - Preface - Doing Violence to the Body: An Ethic of Reading and Writing - Through the Eyes of a Child: Looking for Victims in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye - An Apocalypse of Race and Gender: Body Violence and Forming Identity in Toni Morrison's Beloved - The Body Human: Violating the Self and Violating the Other or Reading the Silenced Narrative, Patrick Suskind's Perfume - The Body Human and the Body Community: Getting the Story Write/Right in D.M. Thomas' The White Hotel - The Games Body-Politics Plays: A Rhetoric of Secrecy in Ian McEwan's The Innocent - Desiring Language and the Language of Desire: Consummating Body-Politics in J.M. Coetzee's Age of Iron - [Re]Telling the Old, Old Story - Concluding an Ethic of Reading and Writing: Literary Criticism as Confession - Select Bibliography - Index