2011 AM Literary Representations of Torture

• Time: Thu 08:00 - 10:00 (A01 0-004)
• Lecturer: Daniel Sip

Course Description

Torture has reappeared in the political sphere of the West despite the international ratification of the Declaration of Human Rigths of 1948 and the United Nations Convention Against Torture in 1984. The prisons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo reveal that torture is not a ghost from the past but is today a distinct modern phenomenon. In literature and particularly in novels torture has been found a fruitful ground to experiment with the various problems and dilemma of language, truth and pain that are connected to torture. To trace the changes torture as a technique has experienced in novels since the 18th century we are going to look at novels and short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Orwell and John Maxwell Coetzee as well as the TV Series 24 - Twenty Four. These readings are always embedded in the historical and theoretical background of torture and its contemporary debate. Against the background of the recent debate around torture's reappearance, the particular focus of analysing these texts will be on the construction, the problematisation and the relevance of descriptive and normative conceptions of torture to these texts and to the cultural settings which produced them and to which they respond. Therefore notions and texts by authors such as Cesare Beccaria, Voltaire, Michel Foucault, Elaine Scarry, Talal Asad, and others will enter our discussions as well. The course offers the opportunity to explore parts of the history of torture and its discourses around 1800 to the present, and to reflect its significance to literary studies. At the core of our seminar will be the close reading of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Leather Funnel (1900), Geroge Orwell's well known 1984 (1949) and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980).

Students should purchase and read in advance:

• Orwell, George. 1984. [1949]. Penguin, 2008.
• Coetzee J.M. Waiting for the Barbarians. [1980]. Vintage, 2004.

[Both will be available at the CvO Bookshop]

Additional materials for preparation, as well as the detailed syllabus, will be made available here.

Requirements: for 3 KP: regular attendance, an oral contribution in the form of a presentation and participation in an ‘expert group’ that will prepare a certain aspect of the seminar’s topic for the final discussion.

Requirements for 6 KP: as above, with a term paper of ca. 10 pp. based on the topic of the presentation.

As part of the "Aktive Teilnahme" regulation we will work in expert groups on the topic of truth and confession, torture and society and torture methods. You find them on the discussion page here in the Wiki.

Bibliography

Primary Material:

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. "The Leather Funnel." (1900).

• Orwell, George. 1984 (1949)

• Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

• 24 - Twenty Four. Dir. Joel Surnow, and Robert Cochran. 20th Television, November 6, 2001. (Season IV: 07:00 AM - 08:00 AM).

Secondary Material

• Gross, Micheal L. "Human Dignity or Human Life: The Dilemmas of Torture and Rendition." Moral Dilemmas of Modern War: Torture, Assassination, and Blackmail in an Age of Asymmetric Conflict (2010).

• Mayer, Jane. "Whatever It Takes: The politics of the man behind '24'". The New Yorker 12 (19 Feb 2007). Web.

• Rejali, Darius. "Whom Do You Trust? What Do You Count On?" On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future. Ed. Abbott Gleason, et al. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005. 155-79.

• Slaughter, Joseph R. "A Question of Narration: The Voice in International Human Rights Law." Human Rights Quarterly 19 (1997): 406-30. Print.

• Coetzee, J.M. "Into the Dark Chamber: The Novelist and South Africa." New York Times Books January 12, 1986.

• Scarry, Elaine. "The Structure of Torture: The Conversion of Real Pain into the Fiction of Power." in: The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. (1985).

07.04.11 Introduction

• Technicalities

• A brief History of Torture

14.04.11 The Leather Funnel

Textual Practice: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Leather Funnel (1900): Narration, Structure, Themes and Motifs.

21.04.11 Orwell: 1948

Textual Practice: Orwell, 1984: Narration, Characterisation

Radu Dragomir

05.05.11 Orwell: 1948

Textual Practice: Orwell, 1984: Structure, Themes and Motifs.

Kristof Senkbeil

12.05.11 Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians

Textual Practice: Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians: Narration, Characterisation

Christian Zielonki

19.05.11 Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians

Textual Practice: Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians: Structure, Themes and Motifs

Verena Sieling

26.05.11 Critical Discussion: Literature and Torture I

• Scarry, Elain. "The Structure of Torture: The Conversion of Real Pain into the Fiction of Power." in: The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.

Sabrina Bagus

09.06.11 Critical Debate Literature and Torture II

• Slaughter, Joseph R. "A Question of Narration: The Voice in International Human Rights Law." Human Rights Quarterly 19 (1997): 406-30. Print.

Wiebke Barkemeyer

16.06.11 Critical Discussion: 1984

• Rejali, Darius. "Whom Do You Trust? What Do You Count On?" On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future. Ed. Abbott Gleason, et al. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005. 155-79.

Sören Niewint

23.06.11 Critical Discussion: Wating for the Barbarians

• Coetzee, J.M. "Into the Dark Chamber: The Novelist and South Africa." New York Times Books January 12, 1986.

30.06.11 24 - Twenty Four

Discussing "24 - Twenty Four" (Season III: 03:00 - 04:00)

• Mayer, Jane. "Whatever It Takes: The politics of the man behind '24'". The New Yorker 12 (19 Feb 2007). Web.

07.07.11 Current Debate on Torture

• Excerpt: CIA, KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, July 1963

The full documents are available on the webpage of the US American National Security Archive. I will upload many of them here by the end of the weekend.

14.07.11 Round up and Outlook

Expert Group Session

Further Reading

• Gross, Micheal L. Moral Dilemmas of War: Moral Dilemmas of Modern War: Torture, Assassination, and Blackmail in an Age of Asymmetric Conflict. Cambridge et. al.: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print.

• Bradshaw, Graham, Michael Neill, and John M. Coetzee, eds. J. M. Coetzee's Austerities. Farnham u.a: Ashgate, 2010. Print.

• Poyner, Jane. J. M. Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship. Farnham u.a.: Ashgate Publ., 2009. Print.

• Slaughter, Joseph R. "Narration in International Human Rights Law." Comparative Literature and Culture 9.1 (2007).

• Schlüter, Gisela. Gegen Folter und Todesstrafe: Aufklärerischer Diskurs und Europäische Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Eds. Helmut C. Jacobs. Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang, 2007. 203-21. Print.

• DelConte, Matt. "A Further Study of Present Tense Narration: The Absentee Naratee and Four-Wall Present Tense in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace." Journal of Narrative Theory 37.3 (2007): 427-446.

• Hunt, Lynn Avery. "Bone of their Bone." Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: Norton, 2007. Print.

• Mayer, Jane. "Whatever It Takes: The politics of the man behind '24'". The New Yorker 12 (19 Feb 2007). Web.

• Howard, Douglas L. "'You're Going to Tell Me Everything You Know': Torture and Morality in Fox's 24." Reading 24: Tv against the Clock. London: Tauris, 2007. 133-45. Print.

• Lenta, Patrick. "'Legal Illegality': Waiting for the Barbarians after September 11." Journal of Postcolonial Writing 42.1 (2006): 71-83.

• Attridge, Derek. "Against Allegory: Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, and the Question of Literary Reading." J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Ed. Jane Poyner. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2006. 63-82.

• Urquhart, Troy. "Truth, Reconciliation, and the Restoration of the State: Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 52.1 (2006): 1-21.

• Kehinde, Ayobami. "African Fiction in the Service of History: Narrating Racial Dissonance in J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." (2006).

• Slaughter, Joseph R. "Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law." PMLA 121 (2006): 1405-1423.

• Sussman, David. "What's Wrong with Torture?" Philosophy & Public Affairs 33.1 (2005): 1-33. Print.

• Kramer, Sven. Die Folter in der Literatur: Ihre Darstellung in der deutschsprachigen Erzählprosa von 1740 bis nach Auschwitz. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004. Print.

• Asad, Talal. "Reflections on Cruelty and Torture." Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Print.

• Burschel, Peter, Götz Distelrath, and Sven Lembke, Eds. Das Quälen des Körpers: Eine Historische Anthropologie der Folter. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2000. Print.

• Sue Kossew. Ed. Critical Essays on J.M. Coetzee. New York/London: Hall, 1998. Print.

• Peters, Edward. Torture. Philadephia: U of Penssivania P, 1996. Print.

• Schulze-Engler, Frank. "Literature and Civil Society in South Africa." ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 27.1 (1996): 21-40.

• Luhmann, Niklas. Gibt es in unserer Gesellschaft noch unverzichtbare Normen? Heidelberger Universitätsreden 4. Heidelberg: C.F. Müller Juristischer Verlag, 1993. Print.

• Cohn, Dorrit. "'I Doze and Wake': The Deviance of Simultaneous Narration." Tales and "their telling difference": Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Narrativik. Ed. Herbert Foltinek, et al. Heidelberg: Winter, 1993. 9-23.

• Gallagher, Susan Van Zanten. "Torture and the Novel: J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Contemporary Literature 29.2 (1988): 277-285.

• Penner, Dick. “Sight, Blindness and Double-Thought in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.” World Literature Written in English 26.1 (1986): 34-45. Print.

• Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Print.

• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books 1979. Print.

• Améry, Jean. "Die Tortur" Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. Eds. Gerhard Scheit and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, (1966) 2002. Print.

• Beccaria, Cesare. An Essay on Crimes and Punishments. London: J. Almon, 1767. ECCO. Web. 20 November 2009.

• Voltaire. "Philosophical Dictionary: Torture." (1764) Ebooks.adelaide.edu.au. Web. 22 February 2010.