Exploring literary representations of mass violence, Robbins traces the emergence of a cosmopolitan recognition of atrocity.
Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, atrocity was not always seen as violating a moral norm or inviting indignation. Could the concept of atrocity even exist before people could accuse their own country of mass violence committed against the inhabitants of another country? Drawing on a vast archive, Bruce Robbins seeks to give atrocity a literary history.
With penetrating insight, Robbins takes up such literary representations of atrocity as Bartolom de las Casas's account of his fellow Spaniards' atrocities, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Grimmelshausen's 1668 novel Simplicissimus, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Gabriel Garc a M rquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Homero Aridjis's short novel Smyrna in Flames, and Tolstoy's Hadji Murat. What's achieved is a profound exploration of the longer trajectory of the emergence of abhorrence and indignation in the face of mass violence and a critical examination of the conditions for the emergence of cosmopolitanism--the ability to look at your own nation with the critical eyes of a stranger.
In the presence of atrocity, what we want most is for someone to bear witness. What is it literature can do with atrocity that simple testimony cannot? Robbins answers by showing how literature goes beyond the legal paradigm of accusation. Meanwhile, venturing from the Bible to Zadie Smith, Robbins pursues the bold proposition that, in the midst of relentlessly repetitive slaughter and nameless, shapeless, irredeemable suffering, humanity's moral history might include a cosmopolitan arc.
Industry Reviews
"Combining a creatively skeptical critical intelligence and an undercurrent of mordant irony, Atrocity is a superb literary and stylistic achievement. Anyone allergic to moral obviousness will find it as impossible to stop reading as I did." -Laura Kipnis, author of Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis "Robbins' brilliant, sweeping Atrocity seeks to release us from the 'indignation-free zone' into which atrocities normally fall. A counterintuitive reading of current discourses on violence." -Bonnie Honig, author of A Feminist Theory of Refusal "A probing study of the moral imagination, written with the erudite informality-and the ethical commitment-that we have come to expect from Bruce Robbins, one of our leading critics on the left." -Adam Shatz, author of The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon "Robbins's affirmative genealogy of cosmopolitan human rights documents the making of moral expectations that deserve to be met in a persistently violent world." -Samuel Moyn, author of Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War "This book carries readers along with clarity, wit, and undogmatic moral seriousness." -Christian Thorne, author of The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment "Robbins makes a humane and exhilarating case for the critical consciousness of atrocity. This is an essential, unsparing and often searing exploration of representations of violence that locates narratives of atrocity at the ethical heart of the humanities." -Patrick Deer, author of Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature
