Is Come And See Disturbing

Revulsion: The Paradox of Disgust in the Rape-Revenge Narrative

The extant scholarship of the rape-revenge narrative has frequently either upheld this narrative form’s feminist bonafides (Clover) or condemned it as misogynistic (Creed). In this volume, West argues that these competing camps of thought have largely elided rape-revenge’s inherent ambivalence, which stems from the paradoxical role disgust plays in rape-revenge texts. That is, disgust is essential for portraying rape as the horrific act it is, but employing disgust in a rape-revenge text risks alienating audiences. To explore this issue, Brandon West first shows the strengths and pitfalls of different methods rape-revenge auteurs have used to approach this disturbing narrative form. Showing rape and revenge in graphic detail has well-documented issues in the scholarship, but the author shows how texts that eschew such graphic portrayals also have their own consequent weaknesses. Thereafter, West articulates the paradox of disgust so he can isolate this key issue hounding these texts and analyses thereof. Then, West shows how disgust plays multiple roles in these texts, roles that make the paradox more challenging to resolve. To this end, the book shows disgust not only risks alienating audiences but also forms part of the pleasure these texts offer audiences. And so, West enumerates the possible pleasures of disgust. Finally, this book pulls these threads together to examine a couple of final rape-revenge texts, one of which, 2017’s 'Revenge', West argues, is the most successful anti-rape narrative discussed in this volume because of the balance it strikes between evoking disgust and avoiding alienating audiences.

Encountering the Secular

In Encountering the Secular, J. Heath Atchley proposes an alternative to the understanding of the secular as that which opposes the religious, and he turns to American and Continental philosophy to support his critique. Drawing from thinkers as disparate as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Gilles Deleuze, and engaging with contemporary literature and film, Atchley shows how the division of experience (individual, cultural, political) into the distinct realms of the religious and the secular overlooks the subtle ways in which value can emerge. Far from arguing that the religious and the secular are the same, he means instead to suggest that the dogmatic separation between these two realms gets in the way of experiencing an immanent value, a kind of value tied neither to a transcendent reality (e.g., a god or an ideal) nor to a self-centered reality (e.g., pleasure or knowledge). Each chapter cultivates a particular concept that challenges the breach between the secular and the religious, rendering that breach ambiguous. Such ambiguity, the author affirms, is relevant to a time when rigid and simplistic notions of religion and secularity are used to justify thoughtlessness and even violence. All too often the secular is thought of either as a triumph in "overcoming" the presumed irrationality and oppression of religion, or as lament in "losing" the meaning religion is thought once to have offered. Atchley suggests a view of the secular as an opportunity to experience an immanent value that is neither controlled by the human self nor conferred by a divine entity. Written in a prose that is lucid, lively, and provocative, Encountering the Secular shows how a philosophical endeavor might be understood as a spiritual practice.

Out of the Fire