This course seeks to understand how authors and filmmakers in the 20th century communicate the experience of violence to their audiences. We will discuss how fragmentation, montage, language breakdown and other techniques not only depict violence, but reflect that violence in artistic forms. We will also ask what representing violence does to the artistic work. Can the attempt to convey violence become an act of violence in itself?
We will consider texts from Vladimir Mayakovsky, John Dos Passos, Andrei Platonov, Vasiliy Grossman, Allen Ginsberg, Anna Akhmatova, Richard Wright, Cormac McCarthy, Vladimir Sorokin, as well as films from Sergei Eisenstein, Alexei Balabanov and Quentin Tarantino. Full course description and syllabus available at readingviolence.weebly.com.
