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Terror and the Arts

Artistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations of Violence from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib

Palgrave Macmillan

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Table of contents (13 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiii
  2. INTRODUCTION The Arts Investigating Terror

    1. INTRODUCTION

      • Matti Hyvärinen, Lisa Muszynski
      Pages 1-22
  3. Visualizing Terror

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 23-23
    2. The Implicated Spectator

      • Frank Möller
      Pages 25-40
    3. Art in the Age of Terror

      • Dana Arieli-Horowitz
      Pages 41-59
    4. The Aura of Terror?

      • Kia Lindroos
      Pages 61-80
  4. Fictionalizing Terror

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 81-81
    2. To This Side of Good and Evil

      • Tuija Parvikko
      Pages 97-112
    3. Narrating the Trauma

      • Kuisma Korhonen
      Pages 113-128
    4. Too Much Terror?

      • Matti Hyvärinen
      Pages 129-144
  5. Governmental Terror

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 145-145
    2. Dictators and Dictatorships

      • Caterina Preda
      Pages 147-163
    3. The Sweet Hereafter of Machiavelli and Weber

      • Javier Franzé
      Pages 185-204
  6. The Terror of Theory

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 205-205
    2. The Violence of Lying

      • Olivia Guaraldo
      Pages 207-223
    3. Terrorized by Sound?

      • Lauri Siisiäinen
      Pages 225-241
  7. Back Matter

    Pages 243-252

About this book

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.

Reviews

"Terror and the Arts vividly explores the fractures and paradoxes of contemporary politics from the viewpoint of aesthetic experience. Be it visual, literary, poetic or musical, art allows us an insight into the terrorized present that can perhaps help in framing it differently, criticizing and avoiding the automatic response of aggression and retaliation. Whoever thinks that the present confronts us with the need to re-think and re-name contemporary violence must read this challenging collection of essays." - Adriana Cavarero, author of Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence

"Terror mobilizes the arts, visual and narrative, as well as their scholarly study. Not only, as can be expected, for the struggle against terrorism or for working through the trauma. In surveying the spaces between general human response to terror and defined political engagement, the insightful and often controversial chapters of this volume also raise more disconcerting questions: about complexities of judgment in the artistic processing of terror, about the possible competition between the arts and the acts that raise the threshold for subversion and shock, about the ways in which the arts can slide or be coerced into normalizing terror or furthering the issues promoted by terrorist groups or regimes, about the arts entrapment in the cultural circulation under the sign of terror, and about the ways in which the arts, politicized by terror, inevitably implicate their audience. The book opens new intellectual vistas, rejecting comfortable attitudes." - Leona Toker, Professor of English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

"How can cataclysmic traumas such as 9/11 or appalling spectacles such as Abu Ghraib be made the objects of art, and what political value might they have? By reading the arts politically, Terror and the Arts demonstrates with great clarity and insight the vitally important role of the arts in imaginatively working through the unspeakable violence of our age." - Mark Freeman, College of the Holy Cross and author of Rewriting the Self

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Tampere, Finland

    Matti Hyvärinen

  • Department of Social Science History, University of Helsinki, Finland

    Lisa Muszynski

About the editors


MATTI HYVÄRINEN is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow, Department of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Tampere, Finland. 
LISA MUSZYNSKI is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Social Science History, University of Helsinki, Finland and an associate member of the Politics and the Arts research team at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change.

Bibliographic Information

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access