Violence And Conflict

Over the last two decades, a constellation of scholars drawing on cultural theory, anthropology, sociology and philosophy declared that the high position of history as a sacred term is challenged, but temporality as the organizing form of experience has been superseded by spatiality, the affective and social experience of space. Anthropologists and feminist theorists remind us that theory travels, knowledge is posited, subjects localized, communities and public spheres diasporic and globalized. In the face of the insistent effects, material and hyperreal, of postindustrial economics and"global cities", cultural theorists exhort their readers"to recognise space, to recognise what'takes place'there and what it is used for."Michel Foucault has his famous proclamation which predicts the coming era of space:"The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. […] the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment."Both of Lefebvre and Foucault hereby declared the prominent fact that in the twentieth century's last years, space/place reflections have moved out from the margins to several sectors of sciences and the humanities in what has been summarized as"the spatial turn".Influenced by such trend of spatial turn, Joyce Carol Oates (1938- ), the author with a"Balzacian"hunger"to put the whole world into a book,"shows her particular interest in space and place, especially in urban space, for Oates has a preference for Detroit, the American city which has provided her infinite inspiration. She thus calls it"a romantic place"and"great subject". As what G. F. Waller has noted, Detroit is"a central symbol in Oates's vision,"and"of all American cities, Detroit must be one of the most powerfully many overlapping and confusing myths of America."Her favor of space in writing is based on her realistic frame of reference. Grey Johnson has commented:"Oates's particular genius is her ability to convey psychological states with unerring fidelity and to relate the intense private experiences of her characters to the larger realities of American life."Therefore, it is necessary for us to read Oates by delving into the social milieu, within which Oates lives, and making an examination of the currents of thought that have a lingering influence to her literary creation, because all these have fashioned Oates's Weltanschauung, or world outlook, and her aesthetic assumptions.From the beginning of her career, Oates has always been a writer to conjure with, taking up the aesthetic legacy of Flannery O'Connor and embracing the Dostoyevskian themes of crime and punishment, sin and redemption. Where her depth of vision and the explosive power of her fiction recommend themselves to the reader, the violence and other extraordinary happenings converged in her works invite puzzlement and difficulty on the part of the reader. Besides, some critics have faulted her for the abundance of violence in her fiction, however, in Oates's case, lingering over violent plot is to show that this dark reality becomes a potentially overwhelming convergence of forces—natural, social, psychological—against which her characters pit their human will to endure. Violence thus becomes one of the centers of the criticism on Oates's literary creation. Oates holds that violence in her fiction is based on the even harder reality and her obligation as a writer is to depict them with authenticity.Herein evolves the theme of the present dissertation—the exploration of the springhead for Oates's predominant occupation of violence in writing by investigating the spatiality in her fiction within the framework of Lefebvre and Foucault's theory on social space.The introduction of the dissertation, first of all, mainly explicates the background of Joyce Carol Oates's literary creation, and outlines the plot of her four novels (them, Wonderland, Angle of Light and Foxfire), which are chosen in the study according to the stages of Oates's writing. After that, Lefebvre and Foucault's ideas on spatiality are expounded.Chapter Two mainly investigate the spatiality in them in the perspective of Lefebvre's space theory. Lefebvre defines social space not merely as the geography of place but as a product of cultural interaction and social intercourse, a sphere of contest in which it is possible to register the convergence of ideological beliefs, socio-cultural habits, and representational practices in constituting what we know more broadly as social relations. This chapter begins with an in-depth spatial reading of the protagonists'disillusion in urban space and concludes terrorism in the alienated everyday life and the uniform, repetitive everydayness as well, brings catastrophe to lower-class citizens, thus it is the springhead of violence in Oates's fiction. Furthermore, with Marxian critique—things will develop in the opposite direction when they become extreme, violence then is read as a positive force that promotes urban revolution to erupt and thereby it accelerates the social evolvement from the abstract space to the differential space.Chapter Three focus on the spatiality in these three novels: Wonderland, Angle of Light and Foxfire with Foucault's methodology on spatialized power and discourse. The relevance of Foucault's discourse theory centers around two potential functions. First, it provides an expansive spatial framework for describing the broad ideological and political influences impacting the individuals in Oates's fiction. Second, Foucault's mode of discourse inquiry provides a systematic analysis of the spatial configuration in Oates's fiction. The key concept in this chapter is Bentham's Panopticon adopted by Foucault as a footstone of his space theory. Bentham designed a cylindrical building of four to six stories consisting of a large number of single cells. The cells were arranged circularly or polygonally around a central watchtower with galleries and viewing box. The tower served as the architectural and administrative center, from which the guards could see into every cell without being seen by the prisoners. This was made possible by a clever and extremely practical lighting arrangement. Windows in the sides of the outer cylinder kept the prisoners always in the light, while the guards remained hidden in the dark center. In such system of prison, power becomes microcosmic, and the gaze thus was called by Foucault as"the Eye of Power."Therefore, the violence and conflict in Oates's fiction is deeply rooted in the microcosmic modern mechanism of power with Panopticon as its model.The last part of the dissertation concludes that the spatial reading of Oates's fiction provide a viable explanation to the springhead for Oates's predominant occupation of violence in writing.