| Original Message |
Stephanie Bramley (no login)
Posted Apr 22, 2008 8:26 PM
My paper will be looking at nonviolence, and more specifically violence to the self, in violently perceived texts such as Fight Club.
I was first interested in writing about nonviolence, and since nonviolence is such a common theme in all our novels, one can imagine I had an easy time deciding which text to write about.
At the same time, I was interested in the scenes in Fight Club when the characters inflict violence upon themselves. They are not violent towards others, but to themselves, or they allow violence to be inflicted upon them, such as (in the film) when Tyler Durden allows himself to be beat up by the building owner Joe in the basement, even egging him on; when the narrator beats himself up in the office in front of his boss; and ultimately when the narrator shoots himself/Tyler at the end. Are those considered nonviolent because they are not hurting anyone else? The streams of ideas in my head were coming closer together.
I then was also very interested in Arendt's text On Violence and her definitions of power, violence, etc. I wanted to tie that into my paper.
So I came up with this: aiming to understand violence to the self in Fight Club through Arendt's paradigms of power and violence and theories of nonviolence to discover if the violence to the self portrayed in Fight Club is possibly considered nonviolent, and simply discover and discuss motives of the characters.
I am researching theories of nonviolence to compare and contrast the actions of the characters in Fight Club to, plus commentary on Fight Club itself. I am viewing all of my research and arguments in light of Arendt's notions of violence and power and how the characters in Fight Club do or do not exhibit those, along with nonviolence.
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