The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History'Culture' and 'violence' have always been regarded as antithetical terms. In The Culture of Violence, Francis Barker takes a different view. Central to his argument is the contention that, contrary to post-Enlightenment humanist, liberal and conservative thought, 'culture' does not necessarily stand in opposition to political inequality and social injustice, but may be complicit with the oppressive exercise of power. The book focuses on Shakespearean tragedy and on the historicism and culturalism of much present-day cultural theory. Barker's analysis moves dialectically backwards and forwards between these two moments in order to illuminate aspects of early modern culture, and to critique the ways in which the complicity between culture and violence has been occluded. Rejecting the tendency of both modernism and post-modernism to homogenise historical time, Barker argues for a genuinely new, 'diacritical' understanding of the violence of history. |
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actually aesthetic anthropology Areopagitica articulated assize assize courts barbarism Benjamin Blade Runner certainly closure Cockburn complex condition constituted course crisis critical cultural cultural anthropology dead death demonisation depredation dialectic difference disidentity displacement domination drama dramatising early modern effect Elizabethan end of history English erasure event executions fact figure gaol Geertz Greenblatt Hamlet hanging historicism Historicist Hobbes Home Circuit identity ideological important insistence interpretation invasion king King Lear land language Lear Lear's least legitimate literary London Macbeth Marx memory metaphor metaphysical Middlesex nature nonetheless occlusion organisation particular past perhaps play play's political possible postmodernism postmodernist practice present problematic question radical radical historicity reading records Renaissance representation represented resistance sense Shakespeare Shakespearean text Shakespearean tragedy signs social society sovereign sovereignty speak strategies structure symbolic symbology Tamora temporal text's textual theoretical theory thick description tion Titus Andronicus totalisation tradition tragedy tragic text true discourse truth violence Walter Benjamin