Speaking about Torture - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0823242242 ISBN 13: 9780823242245

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2012

Synopsis

This collection of essays is the first book to take up the urgent issue of torture from the array of approaches offered by the arts and humanities. In the post-9/11 era, where we are once again compelled to entertain debates about the legality of torture, this volume speaks about the practice in an effort to challenge the surprisingly widespread acceptance of state-sanctioned torture among Americans, including academics and the media–entertainment complex. Speaking about Torture also claims that the concepts and techniques practiced in the humanities have a special contribution to make to this debate, going beyond what is usually deemed a matter of policy for experts in government and the social sciences. It contends that the way one speaks about torture―including that one speaks about it―is key to comprehending, legislating, and eradicating torture. That is, we cannot discuss torture without taking into account the assaults on truth, memory, subjectivity, and language that the humanities theorize and that the experience of torture perpetuates. Such accounts are crucial to framing the silencing and demonizing that accompany the practice and representation of torture.

Written by scholars in literary analysis, philosophy, history, film and media studies, musicology, and art history working in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, the essays in this volume speak from a conviction that torture does not work to elicit truth, secure justice, or maintain security. They engage in various ways with the limits that torture imposes on language, on subjects and community, and on governmental officials, while also confronting the complicity of artists and humanists in torture through their silence, forms of silencing, and classic means of representation. Acknowledging this history is central to the volume’s advocacy of speaking about torture through the forms of witness offered and summoned by the humanities.

About this title

Book Description:

Artists and scholars from the humanities eloquently argue for what they have to say to the contemporary outrage of torture―to how what we know about truth from their disciplines should our affect our responses and condition future policy.

About the Author:

Julie A. Carlson is professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge, 1994), guest-editor of Domestic/Tragedy (SAQ, 1997), and England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Johns Hopkins, 2004) and of articles on Romantic theatre, literature and radical culture, and literary modes of attachment.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0823242242
• ISBN 13: 9780823242245
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384
• Editor: Carlson Julie A., Weber Elisabeth