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Victims and the Postmodern Narrative or Doing Violence to the Body

An Ethic of Reading and Writing

  • Book
  • © 1996

Overview

Authors:
  1. Mark Ledbetter

    1. Millsaps College, Jackson, USA

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Part of the book series: Studies in Literature and Religion (SLR)

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages n1-xiv
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  2. Doing Violence to the Body: an Ethic of Reading and Writing

    • Mark Ledbetter
    Pages 1-21

  3. Through the Eyes of a Child: Looking for Victims in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

    • Mark Ledbetter
    Pages 22-36

  4. An Apocalypse of Race and Gender: Body Violence and Forming Identity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

    • Mark Ledbetter
    Pages 37-55

  5. The Body Human: Violating the Self and Violating the Other, or Reading the Silenced Narrative — Patrick Süskind’s Perfume

    • Mark Ledbetter
    Pages 56-71

  6. The Body Human and the Body Community: Getting the Story Write/Right in D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel

    • Mark Ledbetter
    Pages 72-87

  7. The Games Body-Politics Plays: a Rhetoric of Secrecy in Ian McEwan’s The Innocent

    • Mark Ledbetter
    Pages 88-103

  8. Desiring Language and the Language of Desire: Consummating Body-Politics in J. M. Coetzee’s The Age of Iron

    • Mark Ledbetter
    Pages 104-119

  9. (Re)telling the Old, Old Story

    • Mark Ledbetter
    Pages 120-140

  10. Concluding an Ethic of Reading and Writing: Literary Criticism as Confession

    • Mark Ledbetter
    Pages 141-151

  11. Back Matter

    Pages 152-159
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Millsaps College, Jackson, USA

    Mark Ledbetter

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