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Note: thesis: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020
Genre (aat): theses
Abstract: This dissertation considers literature’s singular mode of bearing witness to – and struggle to come to terms with – historical violence by analyzing representations of cruelty in twentieth and twenty-first-century French and Francophone (from Rwanda and Algeria) texts. “Cruelty” is commonly evoked in the context of war and armed conflict, and we frequently characterize extremely violent acts in general as “cruel.” It is by no means clear what we mean by that word, however, which is the impetus for my analysis of a series of literary texts that examine its meaning. My project concentrates on the representations of “cruel” warfare in diverse works by Gilbert Gatore, Salim Bachi, Maïssa Bey, Marguerite Duras, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. My readings of those texts reveal recurrent characterizations of cruel acts as inhuman or animal. As a result, the question of what constitutes cruelty is transformed into a reflection on the supposed boundary between the human and the inhuman, and on the ways in which subjective and narrative responses to extreme violence make readable – even while simultaneously disavowing – the constitutive instability and imbrication of these very categories. In turn, this conceptualization of cruelty sheds light on other notions such as monstrosity, and relates my research to more general current debate on what constitutes the human. The project thus seeks to contribute to literary, philosophical, historical, political, and legal discussions surrounding modern and contemporary literature, violent conflict, and human rights, and endeavors to understand how the concept of cruelty is mobilized in order to make sense of the motivation, execution, and consequences of military atrocity. By approaching the question of cruelty from the perspective that emerges in my literary examples, this dissertation offers a unified theory of a concept whose sense – in the political, historical and juridical discourses that consistently rely on it – is far from unified. In the final analysis, my project turns to the poetics of language through fiction and the reality of atrocity through history, harnessing, highlighting, and always returning to, ultimately, the power of literature to offer a glimpse into what it means to be human – or not – in times of violence.
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Subject
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Access Condition: rights statement (href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"): In Copyright
Access Condition: restriction on access: All rights reserved. Collection is open to the Brown community for research.
Identifier: DOI: 10.26300/7t1s-sz70
Type of Resource (primo): dissertations