Interpreting Violence: Narrative, Ethics and Hermeneutics

Edited By Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld, Hanna Meretoja.

Representations of violence surround us in everyday life – in news reports, films and novels – inviting interpretation and raising questions about the ethics of viewing or reading about harm done to others. How can we understand the processes of meaning-making involved in interpreting violent events and experiences? And can these acts of interpretation themselves be violent by reproducing the violence that they represent?

This book examines the ethics of engaging with violent stories from a broad hermeneutic perspective. It offers multidisciplinary perspectives on the sense-making involved in interpreting violence in its various forms, from blatant physical violence to less visible forms that may inhere in words or in the social and political order of our societies. By focusing on different ways of narrating violence and on the cultural and paradigmatic forms that govern such narrations, Interpreting Violence explores the ethical potential of literature, art and philosophy to expose mechanisms of violence while also recognizing their implication in structures that contribute to or benefit from practices of violence.

Cassandra Falke is Professor of English Literature at The Arctic University of Norway. She is the author of three books and the editor or co-editor of three others: Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory (ed. 2010), Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820-1848 (2013), The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016), Phenomenology of the Broken Body (co-ed., 2019), Wild Romanticism (co-ed. 2020), and Global Human Rights Fiction (forthcoming).

Victoria Fareld is Associate Professor of Intellectual History at Stockholm University. Her research focuses mainly on political philosophy, theory of history and memory studies, with particular interests in the connections between time, ethics, memory and historical justice. Among her recent articles and book chapters are “Time” (2022), “Framing the Polychronic Present” (2022), “Entangled Memories of Violence” (Memory Studies, 14:1, 2021), “Coming to Terms with the Present,” (2019) and “History, Justice and the Time of the Imprescriptible” (2018).

Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory at the University of Turku, Finland, and Principal Investigator in the Academy of Finland research consortium “Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory” (2018–2023). Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (2018) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (2014), and she has co-edited, with Colin Davis, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (2020) and Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (2018).

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