Bruce Robbins's "Atrocity: A Literary History"

21 Mar 2025 • 52 min • EN
52 min
00:00
52:32
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Eric Newman speaks with Bruce Robbins about his latest book, Atrocity: A Literary History, which explores how literary accounts of mass killing came to shape our collective moral indignation against such violence. Moving from the pre-modern era to the twentieth century, Robbins's book wrestles with how texts from the Bible to Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" reckon–or fail to reckon–with atrocity, drawing out the risks of representing such violence, namely forgetting it altogether or normalizing its horrors.

From "LARB Radio Hour"

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