VIOLENCE IN LITERATURE: PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECT

Does art justify cruelty? If the story is realistic, should it contain a description of the brutal events for the mimesis criterion? Or is violence and cruelty unacceptable because they give rise to new violence? Should the meeting with violence be a catharsis for us that make us better? This question has many interpretations and the purpose of this paper is to clarify the model of solution. The study found that the ancient aestheticization of «useful cruelty» in order to make the reader / viewer suffer had an ambiguous impact on culture, transforming into «cruelty for correction» in the New Age. The perception of cruelty as a means of distinguishing between «one’s own and another’s» (his toriography of the Ancient World and the Early Middle Ages) remained a political device (like fables about a crucified boy as a means of propaganda in the DNR). The legitimating of cruelty as the government’s right to torture (from 1484 to the present) leads us to the totalitarian empires of its century. Cruelty in relationships and cruel revenge, in contrast to the literature of ancient times, is marginalized and is no longer an example for the environment, but a sign of «tabloid literature» - which is a good indicator for society. The main question is: is narrative in literature really a trigger that increases violence? Or does the experience of violence in the literature reduce the level of violence? The study suggests that there is no stable correlation, and recent empirical studies confirm this. Hypothesis of Feschbach’s about the usefulness of cruelty in art has now been refuted by scientists. But we did not find sufficient confirmation of the alternative hypothesis about the pattern of copying cruelty: if a person reads about cruelty, he will not become more cruel. Very useful in this regard is the emergence in the literature of a discourse on the «circle of violence», which removed from the cruel characters a halo of «steepness» - they are now mostly depicted as unhappy people who have suffered in the past. It is no longer cool to be cruel - this is exactly the form of discourse in the future that should give another impetus to reduce the general level of cruelty. Discussing cruelty in literature gives us an opportunity to overcome it. But excessive emphasis on cruelty - aestheticization and admiration for cruel details will only hurt our feelings and will not bring any harm or benefit.

A Form for Writing 20th Century Loss: Aesthetics of Absence in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room

Considered her first modernist novel, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) would be remembered for its experimental techniques to tell the story of Jacob who died in the First World War. Woolf’s construction of her ultimately unknowable character offers a distinct response to the changing realities of warfare and serves as a literary mode of mourning that seeks not to console, but rather to preserve and transmit absence provoked by the losses of the Great War. Here I offer an analysis of Woolf’s aesthetics of absence, which I contend anticipates later concerns in addressing experiences of mass violence in literature. In particular, I trace parallels in Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997) and Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001).

Introduction: Coming after Violence in Literature

The introduction contextualizes the role of Medea through history of violence in performances today and in the history of French theatre of the seventeenth century. It shows how and why violence was never banished from the stage, contrary to prevailing scholarship. It then outlines the concept of the “Medean principle” of violence as a means to consider how tragedy rehearses questions of violence and suggests why Corneille’s 1634 Médée occupies an exceptional place in theatre history. It offers an overview of how the Medean presence functions as a disruptive but persistent force—by disrupting temporal structures upon which premodern theatre is based.