Silence and Subject in Modern Literature - Spoken Violence

"In Peter Handke's play Kaspar, a young man is forced to learn to speak: a process that is a form of physical torture to him. In Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, the young heroine desires to keep as silent as possible, since speech directed at her causes such pain. We are not allowed to remain silent, even when the cost of speech is torture and pain. Silence and Subject in Modern Literature uses a wide variety of texts from forms such as the modern crime novel, via popular classics from authors such as Jane Austen, to avant-garde plays by Samuel Beckett and Handke, to study literary representations of the power relations in which we are forced to speak. Informed by critical theory by Foucault and Bakhtin among others, and touching on fields as diverse as rhetoric, feminism, and the concept of literature, Silence and Subject in Modern Literature engages closely with a central issue in modern life: spoken violence"--

List of contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Cordelia's Silence, Spoken Violence 1. The Exemplary Becomes Problematic, or Gendered Silence: Jane Austen 2. The Secrets of Silence: Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter , Musil's Tonka 3. Refusal, or The Mute Provocateurs: Bartleby Meets Yvonne 4. The Other of Monologue: Strindberg, Camus, Beckett 5. Interrogation, or Forced to Silence: Rankin, Harris, Pinter, Duras 6. Literature as Coerced Speech: Peter Handke's Kaspar 7. Epilogue: The Silence of the Sirens 8. Bibliography Index

Product details

• Authors: U Olsson, U. Olsson, Ulf Olsson
• Assisted by: Ulf Olsson (Editor)
• Publisher: Palgrave UK
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 04.10.2013
• EAN: 9781137350985
• ISBN: 978-1-137-35098-5
• No. of pages: 224
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; B, Performing Arts, Fiction, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literature: history & criticism, Literary theory, Theatre and Performance Arts, European Literature, Literature, Modern—19th century, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literature, Modern—20th century, Twentieth-Century Literature, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, British literature, British and Irish Literature, Fiction Literature, Palgrave Literature Collection, Literature—Philosophy, Beckett;English literature;Harold Pinter;Jane Austen;novel