The Violence of Self-Announcement in post-WWII American Literature
Of late, violence seems to begin well before the event of its happening.
In fact, violence has taken a new form: leaders of terrorist
organizations, responsible for the death of hundreds, give exclusive
face-to-face interviews to media institutions like 60 Minutes or The New
Yorker; top U.S. government officials candidly discuss the United States’
role in Iraq before and after a war that has not yet occurred; and North
Korea publicly announces its every nuclear move. These are not merely
anticipations of violence to come, but are a unique brand of violence that
achieves its aims through its own self-announcement. That is, violence
now calls attention to itself, almost compulsively, causing fear, death,
and trauma without the violence being referenced ever happening. What was
once cold-war posturing is now outdone by doctrines of preemption and a
terror dependent on its public image.
At the same time, contemporary American literature since WWII has become
increasingly gratuitous in calling attention to itself as such - the
levels of meta-narration, meta-irony, or meta-referentiality that texts
enact know no bounds. But what are the effects of so much textual
narcissism? Some authors and critics claim that our illusions and
assumptions about a text are being dispelled, while others note the
tautologous circularity into which so much literature descends. Believing
that this formal homology between politics and literature could be
instructive for both, this panel seeks to understand literature’s
self-announcement in terms of violence.
How can literature, specifically literary form, be said to be violent?
What kinds of violence (inflicted, transcended, avoided, reinscribed etc…)
are manifest by literature’s attempt to call attention to itself, to get
its readers to recognize that to which they were earlier blind? Is a
certain violence enacted when a text over-announces or interprets itself
to its readers? Might literary forms or techniques offer a formal model
for defusing the inevitability of violence, an inevitability that is the
direct effect of violence’s self-announcement? That is, when a text tells
a reader about itself, is the reader empowered through the revelation of a
knowledge that would otherwise remain mystified; or do such ostensibly
transparent proclamations perform a new form of mystification?
Papers should address post-WWII American literature, but this is the
panel’s only circumscription. We seek a diverse array of perspectives,
from any and all disciplines, that treat the intersections of violence and
literary form. Please send a 1 page abstract (as Word attachment or pasted
into the text message) by January 17 to mahuehls@facstaff.wisc.edu.
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