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“We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others. [. . .] Yet what counts now is to win. [. . .] And for this, we have ripped the natural world apart” (Monbiot). This quote stems from a Guardian article that is also printed as an epigraph in Tanya Ronder’s 2015 play Fuck the Polar Bears, and it reveals the connection between the Capitalocene, as described by Jason W. Moore, and contemporary eco-drama: both thematise the “Age of Loneliness” (Monbiot) in which everyone fights against each other. In contemporary drama, this behaviour is frequently reflected in the depiction of isolation and alienation from nature that is expressed in the form of disgust, for instance, by making objects that are associated with nature literally or metaphorically disgusting.To various degrees, the depiction of the Capitalocene in combination with disgust and abjection can be found in Fuck the Polar Bears as well as in Dawn King’s 2011 play Foxfinder. In both plays, disgust is depicted as degrading the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature. The dichotomy of nature and culture then lines up to “a seemingly endless series of human exclusions” (Moore, Introduction 2) and alienates humans from nature. In these plays, a random disgusting object functions as substitute for the border between humans and nature. By making toy polar bears or foxes disgusting, the border between humans and nature, and to some extent between humans and other humans, is redrawn, which leads to an increased sense of isolation and alienation. Therefore, both plays use disgust as a technique to extrapolate the lack of interconnection between humans and nature, which comments on the competitive, isolating, and destructive nature of the Capitalocene.
“We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others. [. . .] Yet what counts now is to win. [. . .] And for this, we have ripped the natural world apart” (Monbiot). This quote stems from a Guardian article that is also printed as an epigraph in Tanya Ronder’s 2015 play Fuck the Polar Bears, and it reveals the connection between the Capitalocene, as described by Jason W. Moore, and contemporary eco-drama: both thematise the “Age of Loneliness” (Monbiot) in which everyone fights against each other. In contemporary drama, this behaviour is frequently reflected in the depiction of isolation and alienation from nature that is expressed in the form of disgust, for instance, by making objects that are associated with nature literally or metaphorically disgusting.To various degrees, the depiction of the Capitalocene in combination with disgust and abjection can be found in Fuck the Polar Bears as well as in Dawn King’s 2011 play Foxfinder. In both plays, disgust is depicted as degrading the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature. The dichotomy of nature and culture then lines up to “a seemingly endless series of human exclusions” (Moore, Introduction 2) and alienates humans from nature. In these plays, a random disgusting object functions as substitute for the border between humans and nature. By making toy polar bears or foxes disgusting, the border between humans and nature, and to some extent between humans and other humans, is redrawn, which leads to an increased sense of isolation and alienation. Therefore, both plays use disgust as a technique to extrapolate the lack of interconnection between humans and nature, which comments on the competitive, isolating, and destructive nature of the Capitalocene.
Violence occurs as a daily human action all over the world; it may cause so many kinds of damage to individuals as well as to society: physical, psychological, or both. Many literary authors of different genres have tried their best to portray violence by showing its negative effects, especially playwrights because they have the chance to show people the dangers of violence through performance on stage to warn them against such negatively affected action. It has been a human action since the beginning of human life on this planet when the first crime happened on earth when Cane killed his brother Abel. In our modern world, people are witnessing daily violent actions as a result of destructive wars that turned the humans into brutal beings. This paper deals with violence as it occurred as a result of the atrocities of wars in two different societies during the same period of the 1990s: A European country (probably Bosnia or Britain), as reflected in Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), and Iraqi, as shown by Ali Abdulnebi Al Zaidi’s Fourth Generation (1997). Although violence takes different shapes, still it has the same destructive effects on the life of people who are involved in. The researcher tries to show how both writers have staged violence during the performances of their plays.
The founder of the Saturday Review of Literature, Henry Seidel Canby, had strong opinions about William Faulkner’s novels, to say the least. Sanctuary, especially, ignited his ire. In a scathing essay entitled “The School of Cruelty,” published in March 1931, Canby deplored what he perceived as the terrible situation of Southern writers, declaring Faulkner the figurehead of a so-called “American sadism.” “So it will be with this new sadism,” Canby wrote, “the novel cruelty by which the American scene with all its infinite shadings is made into something gross, sordid, or, as here, depraved with an ironic depravity in which the trivial by a kind of perversion becomes more horrible than professional evil.” Faulkner is expectedly not the only example of literature deemed “disgusting:” according to Chuck Palahniuk himself, seventy-three people have fainted during public readings of this short story “Guts.” Despite the writer’s obvious delight in describing in vivid detail the fainting spells he witnessed, this specific number is difficult to corroborate. However, numerous readers’ reviews on the popular website Goodreads.com indicate that Palahniuk’s assertions were not unfounded. One reviewer wrote: “I need to talk to someone about this book. I’m trying to digest it. I don’t know if it’s vile trash or provocative writing. It made me feel very strong emotions, which is usually a hallmark of good writing in my opinion, but the emotions were so, so unpleasant […]. I don’t know if my heart or stomach can handle the rest of the book. Is it worth it?” A good question indeed. How can a text, which relies on words on a page and not images, provoke such violent reactions? And finally, can a text be “digested”? Can there be any “pleasure of the text,” to use Roland Barthes’ expression, in the description of something “so, so unpleasant”? This paper is interested in the literary and aesthetic mechanisms enabling a profoundly somatic reading of fiction, especially in the violent experience of disgust, Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg and Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted. I will try to determine the aesthetic and political role disgust plays in these works, in order to prove that the physical unpleasantness caused by the experience of disgust forces readers to confront their societal conditioning by bringing them to the limits of readability.
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