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Bestseller
BestsellerE-book
Author Tanner, Laura E., 1961-

Title Intimate violence : reading rape and torture in twentieth-century fiction / Laura E. Tanner.

Publication Info. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [1994]
©1994

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xiii, 155 pages)
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 149-152) and index.
Contents Reading rape : Sanctuary and The women of Brewster Place -- Reading torture : 1984 and Amnesty International -- Sweet pain and charred bodies : figuring violence in The white hotel -- Envisioning violence : seeing/selling the body in Last exit to Brooklyn -- American psycho and the American psyche : reading the forbidden text -- "Known in the brain and known in the flesh" : gender, race, and the vulnerable body in Tracks.
Summary Victims of rape and torture experience a forced intimacy with their violators that may be exaggerated, unveiled, or obscured in the act of representation. Focusing on acts of "intimate violence" and their fictional representations, this study explores the disturbing dynamics that propel readers into intimate contact with the power of the rapist or the vulnerability of the victim. Using such notorious works as D.M. Thomas's The White Hotel, Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, as well as novels by William Faulkner, George Orwell, Gloria Naylor, and Louise Erdrich, Intimate Violence offers a theory of reading violation that emphasizes the reader's status as negotiator between the conventions of representation and the material dynamics of violence. Suspended between material and semiotic worlds, the reader in the scene of violence must adopt a position relative not only to victim and violator but to the attitudes about violation encoded in representation and experienced through reading. The reader may find the victim's body reduced to literary convention or unveiled with agonizing specificity, be swept up by the rhythms of the violator's force or experience the jarring disruptions of the victim's pain. Appropriating elements of diverse theoretical models, such as feminist film theory, Marxism, and theories of the body, Intimate Violence renders visible the way in which representations of violation may exaggerate the reader's disembodied status or, conversely, lend that reader a textual body which delimits his or her experience of the text.
Access Use copy Restrictions unspecified MiAaHDL
Reproduction Electronic reproduction. [S.l.] : HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010. MiAaHDL
System Details Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
Processing Action digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve MiAaHDL
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
American fiction.
Chronological Term 20th century
Subject English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
English fiction.
Victims of crimes in literature.
Victims of crimes in literature.
Human body in literature.
Human body in literature.
Reader-response criticism.
Reader-response criticism.
Violence in literature.
Violence in literature.
Torture in literature.
Torture in literature.
Women in literature.
Women in literature.
Rape in literature.
Rape in literature.
Chronological Term 1900 - 1999
Genre/Form Electronic books.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Other Form: Print version: Tanner, Laura E., 1961- Intimate violence. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, ©1994 0253356482 (DLC) 93047318 (OCoLC)29565728
ISBN 0585019541 (electronic book)
9780585019543 (electronic book)
0253356482
9780253356482 (cloth ; alkaline paper)