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Author Naqvi, Fatima, author.

Title The literary and cultural rhetoric of victimhood : Western Europe, 1970-2005 / Fatima Naqvi
Published New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan, ©2007

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Description 1 online resource (viii, 264 pages)
Contents Sacrificial Victims: Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin -- Politics of Indifference: Reň Girard and Peter Sloterdijk -- Mediated Invisibility: Michael Haneke -- Apocalyptic Cosmologies: Christoph Ransmayr and Anselm Kiefer -- Melancholia Is Moot: Return to Freud -- Impoverishment and Feminization: Friederike Mayṟcker -- Television's Foreign Voices: Elfriede Jelinek -- A Domain of Sexual Struggle: Michel Houellebecq -- The Quest for the Sacred: Giorgio Agamben
Summary This study analyzes the pervasive rhetoric of victimhood in European culture since 1968. In a radically fragmented public sphere, individuals perceive themselves as dissociated from all others, while at the same time they feel similar to everyone else. Where genuine solidarity and communality is attenuated, people present themselves as victims to garner media attention, create fragile social bonds, or escape supposed marginalization and oppression. Fatima Naqvi commences with interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, arguing that contemporary discourse continues a trajectory mapped in the early 20th century?in the shadow of Nazism. In a series of paradigmatic readings of Reň Girard, Peter Sloterdijk, Michael Haneke, Anselm Kiefer, Christoph Ransmayr, Friederike Mayṟcker, Michel Houellebecq, Giorgio Agamben, and Elfriede Jelinek, she traces the on-going fascination with victimhood and the desire for victim status in the West. She looks at the way in which such cultural anxiety expresses itself; at how victim rhetoric calls itself into question; and, finally, at how it perpetuates itself in the moment that it becomes philosophically ungrounded
Analysis Victim society Victimhood
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Social perception -- Europe, Western
Social psychology -- Europe, Western
Victims in literature.
Victims.
Survivors
Social & cultural anthropology.
Behavioural theory (Behaviourism)
Semantics.
Cultural studies.
Society.
Victims in literature
Social perception
Social psychology
Victims
Western Europe
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2006050185
ISBN 1403975701
9781403975706
9780230603479
0230603475
1281363391
9781281363398
9781349536351
1349536350