The spaces of violence

by James Richard Giles

"James R. Giles examines 10 contemporary American novels for the unique ways they explore violence and space as interrelated phenomena. These stories take place in settings as diverse as small towns, college campuses, suburbs, the brokerage houses and luxury apartments of Wall Street, football stadiums, Appalachian hills, and America's no-man's-land of Greyhound bus stations and highways. Violence, Giles finds, is mythological and ritualistic in many of these novels, whereas it is treated as systemic and naturalistic in others. Giles locates each of the novels he studies on a continuum from the mythological to the naturalistic and argues that they represent a "fourthspace" at the margins of physical, social, and psychological space, a territory at the cultural borders of the mainstream. These textual spaces are so saturated with violence that they suggest little or no potential for change and affirmation and are as degraded as the physical, social, and mental spaces from which they eme