Representation and violence in the americas' literary response to globalization

Résumé

This thesis employs a variety of critical approaches that range from cultural studies to ideology critique, while also keeping in sight the question of power as framed in Foucaultian and New Historicist practice to analyze the representation of violence in contemporary American literature or narrative, in a continental sense. Violence is a major concern in much past and contemporary literature, both in the Americas and elsewhere. The premise of the thesis is that since violence now seems to be everywhere in our globalized societies, we risk becoming consumers of spectacular violence while missing the objective (Zizek, Balibar) or systemic/structural violence that shapes the world we live in. The main goal of this thesis is to highlight this less visible violence by looking at a number of both South and North American texts in in which the question of violence is confronted in innovative and subtle ways. These authors include Roberto Bolaño, Diamela Eltit, Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Charles Yu, as well as Miguel Angel Asturías. An aesthetic of banal violence is also analyzed.