Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing: Chaste Rape - Hardcover

Vitanza, V.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0230112838 ISBN 13: 9780230112834

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Synopsis

Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing This book focuses on rape narratives as grounding for western thinking about community - from the polis to nation-states - specifically in cultures of thinking, reading, and writing. The author rethinks rape, or sexual violence, through a close examination of how rape is a pedagogy that has become canonized in the form of rape stories. Full description

About this title

Review

"We learn from Vitanza how an eccentric axiology may realign completely our understanding of the central features of civilization." - Gregory L. Ulmer, University of Florida

"Vitanza cracks open a forbidden dossier to address the pernicious eventfulness of rape. Timely and distressing, this dreadful work - henceforth unavoidable - swallows whole some aggressively traumatic markers of shared life: What if all our tropes and histories, including the most virtuous, were based on unavowed acts of violation? Derrida has shown how the very principle of hospitality in the Bible hails from Lots' making his daughters sexually available to strangers. Vitanza probes relentlessly into the open secret of relationality, civilization and its profile of social destruction . To my mind this is truly an impossible book - which is why I need interminably to work it through." - Avital Ronell, University Professor of the Humanities, New York University and author of The Test Drive

Book Description

This book focuses on rape narratives as grounding for western thinking about community—from the polis to nation-states—specifically in cultures of thinking, reading, and writing

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0230112838
• ISBN 13: 9780230112834
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 298