Mens Rea and Narratives of Violence: The Guilty Mind in Twenty-First-Century American Literature

IF 0.1 4区 社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY
Joanna Wilson-Scott
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This article presents two twenty-first-century novels that deal with particularly charged and contemporary expressions of violence in the United States: Matthew Quick’s Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock and the threat of armed students in school, and John Updike’s Terrorist and the threat of Islamic extremism. High profile acts of violence of this kind in the United States leading up to and into the years following the turn of the millennium prompted significant concern surrounding the identification of would-be perpetrators, including those in the premeditating stage of their intended attacks. This article argues that stepping away from the violent act and focusing instead on the violent mind situates premeditation as an integral part of violence and its conceptualization. Further, interest in the internalized aspects of violence can be seen as a response to very real socio-cultural concerns in the United States. In order to achieve this analytical focus, the article adopts the legal concepts of mens rea (the guilty mind) and actus reus (the guilty act), interweaving them with literary criticism in order to suggest that novels can serve as Momusian windows into the premeditating stage of violence through immersion into the violent mind. In so doing, they contribute more robustly to broader understandings of violence in the United States as it evolves from concept to action.  
Mens Rea与暴力叙事:21世纪美国文学中的罪恶心理
本文介绍了两本21世纪的小说,它们处理了美国当代特别激烈的暴力表达:马修·奎克的《原谅我》,伦纳德·皮科克和学校里武装学生的威胁,以及约翰·厄普代克的《恐怖分子》和伊斯兰极端主义的威胁。在千禧年之前和之后的几年里,美国发生了这类引人注目的暴力行为,这引起了人们对确定可能的肇事者,包括那些处于预谋攻击阶段的人的极大关注。本文认为,远离暴力行为,转而关注暴力心理,将预谋视为暴力及其概念化的一个组成部分。此外,对暴力内化方面的兴趣可以被视为对美国非常现实的社会文化问题的回应。为了实现这一分析重点,本文采用了犯罪心理(menesrea)和犯罪行为(actus reus)的法律概念,并将它们与文学批评相交织,以表明小说可以通过沉浸在暴力心理中,作为进入暴力预谋阶段的Momusian窗口。在这样做的过程中,他们更有力地促进了对美国暴力从概念到行动的更广泛理解。
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来源期刊
AMERICAN STUDIES IN SCANDINAVIA
AMERICAN STUDIES IN SCANDINAVIA HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY-
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
0.00%
发文量
8
期刊介绍: American Studies in Scandinavia, the journal of the Nordic Association for American Studies, is published twice each year, and carries scholarly articles and reviews on a wide range of American Studies topics and disciplines, including history, literature, politics, geography, media, language, diplomacy, race, ethnicity, economics, law, culture and society. American Studies in Scandinavia is sponsored by the National Councils for Research in Science and the Humanities in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, the journal is published by Odense University Press with the financial support of the Nordic Publications Committee for Humanist Periodicals.
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