Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing Chaste Rape

by Vitanza, Victor J.

• ISBN13: 9780230112834
• ISBN10: 0230112838
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-09-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing: Chaste Rape focuses on rape scripts and narratives as informed by a sacrificial economy that grounds subjectivity and legitimizes community. In search of tutor texts to rethink these scripts and narratives, Victor J. Vitanza turns to the works of Kate Millett as well as the works of Andrea Dworkin, Susan Brownmiller, Virginia Woolf, and Sigmund Freud. Vitanza rethinks rape through a close examination of how sexual violence is a pedagogythat has become canonizedin the form of rapestories. To rethink-reread-rewrite outside this economy, Vitanza combines the work of continental feminisms with philosophies on post-identities and on radical reconsideration of a community without community.

Author Biography

Victor J. Vitanza is a professor of English and Rhetorics at Clemson University and is the founding director of the PhD program in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design in the College of Architecture, Art, and Humanities. He holds a joint appointment at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, where he-is a professor of Rhetoric and philosophy and the Jean-Francois Lyotard Chair. His books include Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric and Writing Histories of Rhetoric.

Table of Contents

“We learn from Vitanza how an eccentric axiology may realign completely our understanding of the central features of civilization.”--Gregory  L. Ulmer, University of Florida

“Vitanza cracks open a forbidden dossier to address the pernicious eventfulness of rape.  Timely and distressing, this dreadful work--henceforth unavoidable--swallows whole some aggressively traumatic markers of shared life: What if all our tropes and histories, including the most virtuous, were based on unavowed acts of violation?  Derrida has shown how the very principle of hospitality in the Bible hails from Lots' making his daughters sexually available to strangers.  Vitanza probes relentlessly into the open secret of relationality, civilization and its profile of social destruction .  To my mind this is truly an impossible book--which is why I need interminably to work it through.”--Avital Ronell, University Professor of the Humanities, New York University and author of The Test Drive