Victims and the Postmodern Narrative or Doing Violence to the Body

1. Front Matter

   Pages n1-xiv

   PDF

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

    PDF

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.

• Close reading
• fiction
• Narrative
• New Testament
• rhetoric

• Millsaps College, Jackson, USA

  Mark Ledbetter

Policies and ethics