UCLA

This project explores how literature can employ formal and rhetorical techniques to implicate readers in political violence, by inviting them to view such violence and their relationship to it from a new and critical perspective. The project conceptualizes what I call the implicated reader, by bringing Michael Rothberg’s concept of “the implicated subject” (2019)—a figure who is neither a victim nor perpetrator but rather indirectly enables or benefits from regimes of violence—into conversation with formalist and narrative studies, particularly the concept of “the implied reader” (Iser 1978). I propose the term implicated reader to designate an implied reader who is implicated in the violent events and structures represented in the given text. I suggest that rather than facilitating the reader’s empathy and identification with victimized subjects, some literary works challenge injustice and provoke political responsibility by prompting readers to imagine themselves in the position of someone who contributes to rather than suffers from political violence.

This project addresses the question: How can writers use literature to transform the way we understand events and structures of political violence as well as our implication in them? To answer this question, I examine a large corpus of texts by writers of color who represent diverse cases of violence, ranging from forced displacement and detention to racial discrimination and genocide. While the selected texts span across multiple genres and historical contexts, they are all written by and/or depict the experiences of politically oppressed, marginalized, or minoritized subjects, and they all deploy strategies of reader implication. Each chapter focuses on works of a particular genre—novels, poetry, memoir, or autofiction—illuminating how different generic conventions and expectations may influence a text’s reader engagement strategies. The chapters identify distinct forms of reader implication, in particular, provocative modes of address to the reader, including second-person “you” and plural “we” forms. By demonstrating how writers, many of whom experience the violence they depict, can construct texts to implicate their readers, this project not only proposes a new framework for literary analysis but also illuminates how people can use literature as a tool to contest political violence.