At 03:29 PM 01/09/2003 -0700, Kevin Burton Smith wrote:
>There's nothing particular literary or
ground-breaking about gratuitous
>offensiveness. It's usually the sign of a weak
writer, not a strong one.
>I'd rather a writer try to mess with my head, not my
gag reflex.
>
>And in the never-ending quest to nail down
definitions, here's a thought:
>It isn't violence itself that makes a book
hard-boiled. It's the attitude
>towards that violence that makes it
hard-boiled.
Yes, by definition good writers do it better than bad writers
and violence for violence sake is boring, but I think this
oversimplifies. I mean, the use of violence and its moral
implications is one of the genre's major themes. And surely
one of the points of at least some authors who portray
extreme acts of violence (by the way, what makes violence
extreme and where is the threshold relative to acceptable
depictions of violence?) is that such depictions should be
offensive, and often are not so perceived in the wider world,
or at least not enough.
Isn't it one of our most challenging ironies that people will
challenge the depiction of extreme violence, but encourage
the practice of state-sanctioned violence? Isn't it
understandable that an author might be tempted to shock
readers out of such complacencies with even more awesome
depictions of extreme violence?
Of course, writers may not do it well, but I think we'd be
wrong to assume that the depiction of extreme violence
automatically means the writer is untalented. The question
is, do such depictions have intrinsic value, and I suspect
the answer might, even after weighing the reasonable nays, be
yes.
Best, Kerry, who'd rather read about extreme violence than be
subjected to it.
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Literary events Calendar (South Ont.) http://www.lit-electric.com
The evil men do lives after them http://www.murderoutthere.com
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