Violence Without God: The Rhetorical Despair of Twentieth-Century Writers

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As twentieth-century writers confronted the political violence of their time, they were overcome by rhetorical despair. Unspeakable acts left writers speechless. They knew that the atrocities of the century had to be recorded, but how A dead body does not explain itself, and the narrative of the suicide bomber is not the story of the child killed in the blast. In the past, communal beliefs had justified or condemned the most horrific acts, but the late nineteenth-century crisis of belief made it more difficult to come to terms with the meaning of violence. In this major new study, Joyce Wexler argues that this situation produced an aesthetic dilemma that writers solved by inventing new forms. Although Symbolism, Expressionism, Modernism, Magic Realism, and Postmodernism have been criticized for turning away from public events, these forms allowed writers to represent violence without imposing a specific meaning on events or claiming to explain them. Wexlers investigation of the way we think and write about violence takes her across national and period boundaries and into the work of some of the greatest writers of the century, among them Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Alfred Dblin, Gnter Grass, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Salman Rushdie, and W. G. Sebald.

Reviews

Joyce Wexler makes an important, theoretically informed argument about the many ways in which the experimental indeterminacies of modernist form respond to the social and historical dilemmas of the long twentieth century. She provides a coherent account of an exceptional variety of texts without oversimplifications that ignore or reduce their differences. Students, teachers, and readers of all kinds will find this book an accessible, engaging introduction to modern fiction in particular and to the modern period in general. * Paul Armstrong, Professor of English, Brown University, USA *
Violence Without God pursues the riveting question of the relationship between unthinkable violence and various twentieth-century avant gardes. Working with Charles Taylors argument that, when secularism is understood as a lack of consensus about what to believe, the uncontainability of violence becomes incomprehensible to modern minds. In tracking that issue, this book uncovers some extraordinary continuities between early modernism, interwar modernism, late modernism, postwar writing, and postcolonialism, while simultaneously delineating how and why their distinctive aesthetic shifts occurred. This book offers an equally impressive intervention in recent developments within modernist studies and global comparativism. Its close comparisons between Anglo and Germanic texts mark a major step in delineating those crucial cross-cultural relationships. * Holly Laird, Professor of English, University of Tulsa, USA *
Ambitious, impressive, and provocative Violence Without God is an important, exciting book that I found myself thinking about for some time after I read it An exemplar of well-executed, bold scholarship written in lucid, energetic prose that can help us to rethink the intersections between form and history in modern literature. Wexler deftly moves among texts and theories (including trauma theory, new materialist theories, and psychoanalysis) to construct the kind of original argument that offers a new way of thinking about literary history of the past century. * James Joyce Quarterly *

Author Bio

Joyce Wexler is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Loyola University Chicago, USA. She is the author of three books, including Who Paid for Modernism (1997). She has published widely on twentieth-century aesthetic movements, cultural studies, publishing history, Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence, and is Vice President of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America.