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T. C. Boyle’s The Harder They Come: Violence in America

  • Peter Freese EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 19. September 2017
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Abstract

T. C. Boyle’s fifteenth novel The Harder They Come (2015) offers a fictional inquiry into the American propensity for violence and takes its title from Jimmy Cliff’s 1972 reggae song and its motto from D. H. Lawrence’s characterization of the “essential American soul [as] hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer” (1978: 68). The article investigates how Boyle creates a metafictional historiography by combining two unrelated historical events – the bare-handed killing of a mugger by an elderly American veteran in Costa Rica and the long police hunt for the schizophrenic murderer Aaron Bassler in the Mendocino Redwoods – with a fictional character who represents the paranoid fringe worlds of sovereign citizens. The article then shows how Boyle embeds his plot in a general atmosphere of menace and incorporates the legend of the heroic mountain man John Colter, thus adding historical depth and evoking the world of wilderness survivalists. It also examines the narrative techniques, such as the choice of a schizophrenic’s point of view, and the stylistic features employed in order to fuse these ingredients into a thrilling tale that reveals the hidden relations between American foundation myths and the threats of contemporary gun violence.

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Published Online: 2017-9-19
Published in Print: 2017-9-6

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Articles
  3. Pirates, Captives, and Conversions: Rereading British Stories of White Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean
  4. George Orwell’s Imperial Bestiary: Totemism, Animal Agency and Cross-Species Interaction in “Shooting an Elephant”, Burmese Days and “Marrakech”
  5. Enacting Authenticity: Peter Nichols’s Passion Play and Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or in Dialogue
  6. Wallace Stevens’s Poetics of the Other
  7. T. C. Boyle’s The Harder They Come: Violence in America
  8. ‘Sublime Oilscapes’: Literary Depictions of Landscapes Transformed by the Oil Industry
  9. Reviews
  10. Elena Seoane and Christina Suaréz-Gómez (eds.). World Englishes: New Theoretical and Methodological Considerations. Varieties of English Around the World G57. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins, 2016, 285 pp., € 95.00/$ 143.00.
  11. Carola Trips. English Syntax in Three Dimensions: History – Synchrony – Diachrony. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015, viii + 239 pp., € 29.95.
  12. Annina Seiler. The Scripting of the Germanic Languages: A Comparative Study of “Spelling Difficulties” in Old English, Old High German and Old Saxon. Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen 30. Zürich: Chronos, 2014, 268 pp., 77 figures, CHF 38.00/€ 34.00.
  13. Fran Colman. The Grammar of Names in Anglo-Saxon England: The Linguistics and Culture of the Old English Onomasticon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, xii + 310 pp., £ 75.00.
  14. Leonard Neidorf. Foreword by Gregory Nagy. The Transmission of Beowulf: Language, Culture, and Scribal Behavior. Myth and Poetics 2. Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 2017, 221 pp., 8 illustrations, $ 55.00.
  15. Tamara Atkin and Francis Leneghan (eds.). The Psalms and Medieval English Literature: From the Conversion to the Reformation. Cambridge: Brewer, 2017, 362 pp., 18 illustr., £ 60.00.
  16. Aysha Pollnitz. Princely Education in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, xiv + 445 pp., £ 79.99/$ 125.00.
  17. Jan Alber. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Frontiers of Narrative Series. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2016, xi + 310 pp., $ 55.00.
  18. Patrick Parrinder. Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, ix + 222 pp., £ 55.00/$ 90.00.
  19. Thomas Girst. Art, Literature and the Japanese American Internment: On John Okada’s No-No Boy. American Culture 12. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2015, 266 pp., 28 figures, € 58.91/£ 40.00/$ 64.95.
  20. Clemens Spahr. A Poetics of Global Solidarity: Modern American Poetry and Social Movements. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, xiii + 255 pp., 5 illustr., $ 99.00.
  21. Katja Kurz. Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns. American Studies – A Monograph Series 252. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015, ii + 271 pp., € 48.00.
  22. Gabriele Dürbeck and Urte Stobbe (eds.). Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung. Böhlau Studienbücher. Köln: Böhlau, 2015, 315 pp., 3 illustr., € 19.99.
  23. Serenella Iovino. Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation. Environmental Cultures. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2016, 184 pp., 12 illustr., £ 72.00.
  24. Books Received
https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2017-0048

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Articles
  3. Pirates, Captives, and Conversions: Rereading British Stories of White Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean
  4. George Orwell’s Imperial Bestiary: Totemism, Animal Agency and Cross-Species Interaction in “Shooting an Elephant”, Burmese Days and “Marrakech”
  5. Enacting Authenticity: Peter Nichols’s Passion Play and Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or in Dialogue
  6. Wallace Stevens’s Poetics of the Other
  7. T. C. Boyle’s The Harder They Come: Violence in America
  8. ‘Sublime Oilscapes’: Literary Depictions of Landscapes Transformed by the Oil Industry
  9. Reviews
  10. Elena Seoane and Christina Suaréz-Gómez (eds.). World Englishes: New Theoretical and Methodological Considerations. Varieties of English Around the World G57. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins, 2016, 285 pp., € 95.00/$ 143.00.
  11. Carola Trips. English Syntax in Three Dimensions: History – Synchrony – Diachrony. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015, viii + 239 pp., € 29.95.
  12. Annina Seiler. The Scripting of the Germanic Languages: A Comparative Study of “Spelling Difficulties” in Old English, Old High German and Old Saxon. Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen 30. Zürich: Chronos, 2014, 268 pp., 77 figures, CHF 38.00/€ 34.00.
  13. Fran Colman. The Grammar of Names in Anglo-Saxon England: The Linguistics and Culture of the Old English Onomasticon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, xii + 310 pp., £ 75.00.
  14. Leonard Neidorf. Foreword by Gregory Nagy. The Transmission of Beowulf: Language, Culture, and Scribal Behavior. Myth and Poetics 2. Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 2017, 221 pp., 8 illustrations, $ 55.00.
  15. Tamara Atkin and Francis Leneghan (eds.). The Psalms and Medieval English Literature: From the Conversion to the Reformation. Cambridge: Brewer, 2017, 362 pp., 18 illustr., £ 60.00.
  16. Aysha Pollnitz. Princely Education in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, xiv + 445 pp., £ 79.99/$ 125.00.
  17. Jan Alber. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Frontiers of Narrative Series. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2016, xi + 310 pp., $ 55.00.
  18. Patrick Parrinder. Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, ix + 222 pp., £ 55.00/$ 90.00.
  19. Thomas Girst. Art, Literature and the Japanese American Internment: On John Okada’s No-No Boy. American Culture 12. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2015, 266 pp., 28 figures, € 58.91/£ 40.00/$ 64.95.
  20. Clemens Spahr. A Poetics of Global Solidarity: Modern American Poetry and Social Movements. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, xiii + 255 pp., 5 illustr., $ 99.00.
  21. Katja Kurz. Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns. American Studies – A Monograph Series 252. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015, ii + 271 pp., € 48.00.
  22. Gabriele Dürbeck and Urte Stobbe (eds.). Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung. Böhlau Studienbücher. Köln: Böhlau, 2015, 315 pp., 3 illustr., € 19.99.
  23. Serenella Iovino. Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation. Environmental Cultures. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2016, 184 pp., 12 illustr., £ 72.00.
  24. Books Received
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