Document Type : Original Article
Author
MA student, School of Foreign Studies, University of Science and Technology Beijing
Abstract
Warfare, rape, Holocaust, different forms of violence in war, and silence on the crimes are the main themes in the history of twentieth century. Timberlake Wertenbaker rewrites the Greek myth to voice the injustice of women in sexual violence and calls for the awakening of female awareness to make their own history in The Love of the Nightingale. In depicting the rape, violence, silence, resistance, and myth, Wertenbaker examines modern violence politics, hegemony discourse and tragic history so as to make the muted, silenced violence public for a possible yet belated judgement and trial. Focusing on the painful body in Great World War II, Ken Liu examines modern violence politics, hegemony discourse and tragic history so as to make the muted, silenced violence public for a possible yet belated judgement and trial in The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary. Brave enough to write the events other writers are afraid of, Liu and Wertenbaker are transgressor as well as a moral parrhesiastes, who seek to get rid of Western hegemonic discourse and voice their own sober opinion toward personal memory and transnational history. The themes of rape, violence, injustice presented in their works are far more than gender, family, society, but relate to the political ideology regarding to race, cultural and state. They endow the past myth with contemporary societal and political meaning, thus, the rape is not on the sexual desire of male to female, but the hegemony rapes the truth, the imperial ideology rapes the history.
Keywords
)