In the late 1990s, Alice Sebold is writing what will become her phenomenally successful novel The Lovely Bones (2002), but she finds herself having to abandon it in order to write her critically ...acclaimed rape memoir Lucky (1999). She did not want, she says years later, Susie Salmon (the novel’s dead narrator) doing “work for her”, but wanted Susie free “to tell her own story”. Lucky would be the “real deal” about rape, while The Lovely Bones would be a fantasy. And yet, the memoir and novel are similar in many respects; and nearly identical to begin with. The Lovely Bones opens with the rape, murder and mutilation of a young girl – Susie – while Lucky opens with reference to the girl who was raped, murdered and mutilated in the tunnel Sebold was also raped in. This girl, Sebold maintains, always haunts her. Thus, I will argue, it is not possible to read her novel, which some critics have dismissed as “timid and sentimental”, without reading her gritty autobiography; and vice versa it is not possible to read Sebold’s rape memoir without reading her novel, which in a complex way bears witness to that unnamed girl, if not for all dead, unnamed girls. The question is, then, how does the intertextuality of Sebold’s novel and memoir, and, more broadly, the interrelationship of truth and fantasy, impact on our reading of Sebold’s work, especially her memoir?
Keywords
Rape, fact, fiction, truth, lie, reading, writing, creative witnessing, wishful thinking, utopia
Sociology is just as much an art form as it is a science. And while sociologists and those in cognate disciplines have long experimented with their writing, the search for new academic forms and ...practices has acquired new urgency and potentiality. How we write up our research is of paramount importance: our language can be used in experimental and innovative ways to offer nuanced, critical commentary without foreclosing alternative viewpoints, and without excluding others from dialogue. Sociography offers spaces for new sensibilities and sensitivities; unresolved or incomplete argument; multiple, multi-dimensional and multiplying possibilities: for writing differently. As an intervention in writing the social, our collection works to resist the ideological promotion of dry, dispassionate, and seemingly ‘objective’ discourse, one which has traditionally upheld a set of dominant, privileged voices. And in so doing, our collection explores the potential of new ways of writing the social for both a trans- and post-disciplinary academy and a wider reading public; and seeks forms of writing that do justice to the critical curiosity that animates sociology. In sum, the challenge embraced by this collection is to argue for and showcase a praxis that activates sociological knowledge and enlarges the sociological imagination.
The visual fix Kilby, Jane
European journal of social theory,
08/2013, Letnik:
16, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article questions the value of photographs of violence and suffering. Taking Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois’ anthology Violence in War and Peace (2004) as a point of departure and ...return, it will explore the significance of the inclusion of images of explicit violence when they readily acknowledge they risk both indifference and voyeuristic interest. Key to my analysis is the centrality of the body to the images. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois are wary of reducing questions of violence to bodily suffering, but the admission of so many images of physical violation undercuts their critique of the primacy of the physical in our accounts of violence. The use of the body as a brute signifier of violence is deeply problematic, not least because it is tied to questions of race. Ultimately, it is argued, they attempt, unconsciously, to fix the nature of violence – which they deem slippery because it is irrefutably social – in the (visualized) body.
PDF
