Document Type
Essay/Newsletter
Media Type
Text
Abstract
Originally given as part of a special session panel, "Torture and Interrogation," at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco, California, on December 27, 2008, this paper connects contemporary critical discussions of interrogation to the representation of lynching and police brutality in the early twentieth-century United States. It places American modernist literature, especially William Faulkner's Light in August, within a broad cultural tradition of thought about extralegal violence, and it argues that the novel's poetic strategies for depicting and analyzing such violence offer a diagnostic alternative to the sentimental discourse that dominates debates about interrogation in the interpretive humanities and critical legal theory. Critics tend to approach interrogation as either a technique of intelligence gathering or a ritual of domination, two apparently irreconcilable views. Faulkner's novel, whose aesthetics depend on a contrast between figures of stasis and figures of motion, suggests that the posing of questions plays a necessary role in the ritual exercise of power. The question transforms a repetitive or regressive act into a forward-looking investigation oriented towards an indefinite future.
First Page
433
Last Page
440
Publication Date
5-1-2009
Department
Other
ISSN
0734-1490
Language
eng
Publisher
Northern Illinois University Law Review
Recommended Citation
Smith, Caleb
(2009)
"Torture, Interrogation, and American Modernist Literature,"
Northern Illinois University Law Review: Vol. 29:
Iss.
2, Article 5.
Suggested Citation
Caleb Smith, Torture, Interrogation, and American Modernist Literature, 29 N. Ill. U. L. Rev. 433 (2009).
