Literature and Terrorism

Session Coordinator: Jolene Barjasteh

St. Olaf College

barjaste@stolaf.edu

“Terrorism and Nihilism in Dostoevsky’s The Devils” 

What drives certain individuals to acts of violence and self-destruction?  This paper explores Dostoevsky’s fascination with this question through frameworks of both literary and historical analysis.   Consideration of his novel The Devils within the context of the real-life events that inspired it and the broader intellectual and cultural milieu of nineteenth-century Russia reveals the many tensions and anxieties of modernity.  In particular, the question of spiritual disease informed Dostoevsky’s exploration of nihilism.   Although he condemns Russian socialist revolutionaries as having lost all humanity, Dostoevsky raises troubling, and perhaps timeless, questions about the relationship between the alienating, dehumanizing effects of modern life and the desperation and nihilism that lead to violence.  While he seeks a remedy to nihilism in the revival of Russian Orthodox Christianity, Dostoevsky also blames (holds responsible?) those who ignore the suffering of the less fortunate, the condemned, and the forgotten.   This paper seeks to illuminate the conundrum of modernity that Dostoevsky identifies, while also situating his motifs of moral contagion and spiritual disease within the intellectual and social context of nineteenth-century Russia.

Anna Kuxhausen

St. Olaf College

kuxhause@stolaf.edu

“Terrorism and Morality: Camus’s Les Justes”

This paper presents, develops and scrutinizes an ethical evaluation of terrorism that has emerged from a reading of Albert Camus’s play Les Justes (English translation: The Just Assassins). The play’s setting is Russia in 1905 and centers on a real historical event, the assassination by a Russian revolutionary group of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, a Czarist military and political functionary and member of the ruling Romanov family. At the center of the paper is an interpretation of the play offered by political theorist, Michael Walzer. According to Walzer, the moral view emerging from the play is that while assassination of political or military agents might have some degree of moral justification when grounded in principles of justice, the justification is always equivocal or ambiguous, that even justified assassination requires atonement and that “just assassins” are bound by a moral code imposing limits on means, including an absolute prohibition on murdering innocents. The paper will develop the Walzerian reading, test its adequacy as an interpretation of the play and consider in its own right the moral position attributed.

Edmund N. Santurri

St. Olaf College

santurri@stolaf.edu

“Terrorism: A Comic Response to a Tragic Flaw in Humanity”

Terrorism, the 1999 play by the Presnyakov brothers, uses a series of vignettes to meditate on the pervasive nature of terrorism in human society. The Presnyakov brothers fall within the comic Russian tradition of Gogol in which society and individuals are satirized and commented on through the use of the grotesque and carnival. This paper will look at the various techniques employed by the authors to portray terrorism not as an extreme phenomenon, but squarely within the norm of the human condition.

Marc Robinson

St. Olaf College

robinso@stolaf.edu

“The Making of a Terrorist in Yasmina Khadra's Les Sirènes de Bagdad”

Les Sirènes de Bagdad, the final book in Algerian-born writer Yasmina Khadra’s controversial trilogy devoted to the topic of present-day terrorism in the Middle East, has become a bestseller in both French and in recent English translation. Written in the first-person, the novel offers the reader a complex but convincing portrait of an unemployed, would-be university student who gradually becomes enmeshed in a terrorist plot, an outgrowth of insurgent activity against the American troops in Iraq. Khadra invites his readers, especially those from the West, to enter the mind of an ordinary young Iraqi from a small village, to witness the disintegration of a nation and its peoples through his eyes, and to begin to grasp the real horrors of war by observing his protagonist’s downward spiral into terrorism. In this paper, I will explore the notions of authenticity, personal dignity, family honor, and revenge as Khadra relates them to the concept of identity for his Bedouin protagonist. While Khadra may acknowledge that we live in a morally ambiguous world, he also manifests concern for the future of humanity in this novel and offers a cautionary note regarding the desire for revenge that may spawn terrorism. I will thus offer a close, critical reading of the final pages of Khadra’s text in which he suggests significant lessons about the nature of terrorism for “Westerners” – from the justification of such acts, to appropriate strategies for dealing with terrorists, and, finally, to the overall human cost of terrorism.

Jolene Barjasteh

St. Olaf College

barjaste@stolaf.edu