Kurzbeschreibung:

Exploring literary representations of mass violence, Bruce Robbins traces the emergence of a cosmopolitan recognition of atrocity.
Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, what we think of now as atrocities have not always invited indignation or been seen to violate moral norms. Venturing from the Bible to Zadie Smith, Robbins explores the literature of suffering, to show how, over time, abhorrence of mass violence takes shape. With it comes the emergence of a necessary element of cosmopolitanism: the ability to look at ones own nation with the critical eyes of a stranger.
Drawing on a vast written archive and with penetrating insight, Robbins takes up such literary representations of violence as Bartolomé de las Casass account of his fellow Spaniards atrocities, Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five, Grimmelshausens 1668 novel Simplicissimus, David Mitchells Cloud Atlas, Gabriel García Márquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude, Homero Aridjiss short novel Smyrna in Flames, and Tolstoys Hadji Murat. These essential texts do more than simply testify to atrocious acts. In their literariness, they take the risk of contextualizing and relativizing, thereby extending beyond the legal paradigm of accusation. They recognize atrocity as a moral scandal about which something should be done and can be done, while they also place that scandal within a larger and more uncertain history.