The Figure of the Terrorist in Literature and Visual Culture PDF Download

Author: Maria Flood
Publisher: EUP
ISBN: 9781474497589
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Contains thirteen original essays and an expansive introduction, including contributions by some of the foremost scholars in the field

Author: Jonathan Harris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780429433818
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
"This book assesses the key definitions, forms, contexts and impacts of terrorist activity on the arts in the modern era, using historical and contemporary perspectives. Its empirical case studies include theatre, literature, music, visual art, mass media, film and the mores of 'ordinary life.' While its immediate reflective context is Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, the book reviews a broader range of definitions and counter-definitions of 'terrorism', 'state terrorism' and 'states of terror,' examining uses of the term through a series of comparative analyses. Chapters focus on the intersection of these definitional questions with heuristic analysis of art forms, cultural activities and their socio-historical contexts. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, terrorism, politics and the media, and visual culture"

Author: Sue Malvern
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
ISBN: 9781780767017
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Terrorism has a variety of contexts, histories and forms which have all been the focus of intense scrutiny in recent years, whilst cultural representations of the terrorist have received much less attention, which is odd when we consider that terrorism by its very nature is spectacle. Dissident organisations create images of terrorists as martyrs, heroes or avengers and international counter terrorist agencies visualise them to provide the threat with a recognisable persona. Osama bin Laden for example was variously portrayed as effeminate and sexually depraved and pictures of his dead body were banned from publication by the United States government. Terrorist Transgressions examines images of the terrorist and discusses in what way they challenge societal norms, particularly those surrounding gender. Despite the traditional alliance between terrorism and masculinity, women have been active in terrorist organisations and through tactics such as suicide bombing have used their very bodies as weapons. Such attacks have subverted cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity and have had profound repercussions for both the gendering of violence and the terrorist profile. This book explores how the terrorist is represented and the processes through which they have subsumed so many popular cultural myths. It discusses how a terrorist's capacity for destruction can be linked to their appropriation or rejection of gender stereotypes and includes essays on masculinities in post-conflict Northern Ireland, gendered insurgency, the colonial state of exception, Oedipal rivalries, the German Red Army Faction, masculinity in Fox television saga 24 and Anders Behring Breivik's sartorial code. In addition to essays that debate the broad imagery that surrounds terrorism's visual cultures it includes pages by artists who question the role of censorship and the physiognomy of evil.

Author: Michael C. Frank
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134837364
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
This study investigates the overlaps between political discourse and literary and cinematic fiction, arguing that both are informed by, and contribute to, the cultural imaginary of terrorism. Whenever mass-mediated acts of terrorism occur, they tend to trigger a proliferation of threat scenarios not only in the realm of literature and film but also in the statements of policymakers, security experts, and journalists. In the process, the discursive boundary between the factual and the speculative can become difficult to discern. To elucidate this phenomenon, this book proposes that terror is a halfway house between the real and the imaginary. For what characterizes terrorism is less the single act of violence than it is the fact that this act is perceived to be the beginning, or part, of a potential series, and that further acts are expected to occur. As turn-of-the-century writers such as Stevenson and Conrad were the first to point out, this gives terror a fantastical dimension, a fact reinforced by the clandestine nature of both terrorist and counter-terrorist operations. Supported by contextual readings of selected texts and films from The Dynamiter and The Secret Agent through late-Victorian science fiction to post-9/11 novels and cinema, this study explores the complex interplay between actual incidents of political violence, the surrounding discourse, and fictional engagement with the issue to show how terrorism becomes an object of fantasy. Drawing on research from a variety of disciplines, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism will be a valuable resource for those with interests in the areas of Literature and Film, Terrorism Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Trauma Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Author: Bootheina Majoul
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527538451
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This volume celebrates literature as a strong subversive tool, as an alternative for change, through an exploration of terrorism in various literary works. It brings together scholars from all over the world, including Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Cameroon, Denmark, India, Italy, Tunisia, Turkey, and the USA, to offer their insights. As readers themselves, they share an eagerness to understand the psychopathological personalities circulating among us. They urge the reader to dig deep into literature, to think, to cogitate and to learn. One of the most important literary figures dealing with terrorism in his novels is the internationally acclaimed Indian writer Tabish Khair, who generously wrote the foreword to this volume. He sheds light on the possibilities offered by literature as a means of dissent and a powerful tool for truth telling.

Author: Basuli Deb
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317632117
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This book offers a transnational feminist response to the gender politics of torture and terror from the viewpoint of populations of color who have come to be associated with acts of terror. Using the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, this book revisits other such racialized wars in Palestine, Guatemala, India, Algeria, and South Africa. It draws widely on postcolonial literature, photography, films, music, interdisciplinary arts, media/new media, and activism, joining the larger conversation about human rights by addressing the problem of a pervasive public misunderstanding of terrorism conditioned by a foreign and domestic policy perspective. Deb provides an alternative understanding of terrorism as revolutionary dissent against injustice through a postcolonial/transnational lens. The volume brings counter-terror narratives into dialogue with ideologies of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and religion, addressing the situation of women as both perpetrators and targets of torture, and the possibilities of a dialogue between feminist and queer politics to confront securitized regimes of torture. This book explores the relationship in which social and cultural texts stand with respect to legacies of colonialism and neo-imperialism in a world of transnational feminist solidarities against postcolonial wars on terror.

Author: Alex Houen
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191541982
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Is terrorism's violence essentially symbolic? Does it impact on culture primarily through the media? What kinds of performative effect do the various discourses surrounding terrorism have? Such questions have not only become increasingly important in terrorism studies, they have also been concerns for many literary writers. This book is the first extensive study of modern literature's engagement with terrorism. Ranging from the 1880s to the 1980s, the terrorism examined is as diverse as the literary writings on it: chapters include discussions of Joseph Conrad's novels on Anarchism and Russian Nihilism; Wyndham Lewis's avant-garde responses to Syndicalism and the militant Suffragettes; Ezra Pound's poetic entanglement with Segregationist violence; Walter Abish's fictions about West German urban guerrillas; and Seamus Heaney's and Ciaran Carson's poems on the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland. In each instance, Alex Houen explores how the literary writer figures clashes or collusions between terrorist violence and discursive performativity. What is revealed is that writing on terrorism has frequently involved refiguring the force of literature itself. In terrorism studies the cultural impact of terrorism has often been accounted for with rigid, structural theories of its discursive roots. But what about the performative effects of violence on discourse? Addressing the issue of this mutual contagion, Terrorism and Modern Literature shows that the mediation and effects of terrorism have been historically variable. Referring to a variety of sources in addition to the literature—newspaper and journal articles, legislation, letters, manifestos—the book shows how terrorism and the literature on it have been embroiled in wider cultural fields. The result is not just a timely intervention in debates about terrorism's performativity. Drawing on literary/critical theory and philosophy, it is also a major contribution to debates about the historical and political dimensions of modernist and postmodernist literary practices.

Author: Christiana Spens
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783030048815
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book explores how terrorists have been portrayed in the Western media, and the wider ideological and social functions of those representations. Developing a theory of scapegoating related to narrative closure, as well as an integrated, genealogical method of intervisuality, the book proposes a new way of thinking about how political images achieve power and influence the public. By connecting modern portrayals of terrorists (post-9/11) with historical and fictional images of villains from Western cultural history, the book argues that the portrayal and punishment of terrorists in the Western media implicitly perpetuates neo-Orientalist attitudes. It also explains that by repeating these narrative patterns through a ritual of scapegoating, Western media coverage of terrorists partakes in a social process that uses punishment, dehumanization and colonialist ideas to purge the iconic ‘villain’, so as to build national unity and sustain hegemonic power following crisis.

Author: M. Hyvärinen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230614132
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This book advances the argument that the arts, from film and literature to painting and comics, offer qualitatively different readings of terror and trauma that endeavor to resist the exploitation and perpetuation of violence.

Author: Josephine M. Guy
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474408931
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The first scholarly comparative analysis of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze's philosophies of difference.