VIOLENT PERSPECTIVES, PERSPECTIVES ON VIOLENCE

With our readings and discussions in mind, I would like you to take some time to view the historical photographs and postcards of lynching collected at Without Sanctuary. In the narrative that accompanies the movie shown on the website, the collector James Allen says,

Studying these photos has engendered in me a caution of whites, of the majority, of the young, of religion, of the accepted. Perhaps a certain circumspection concerning these things was already in me, but surely not as actively as after the first sight of a brittle postcard of Leo Frank dead in an oak tree. It wasn't the corpse that bewildered me as much as the canine-thin faces of the pack, lingering in the woods, circling after the kill.

For your first blog assignment, reflect and write on your experience as viewers of the photographs and postcards of lynching and compare this to your experience as readers of literary texts that represent similar acts of unspeakable violence. How does viewing a postcard of a lynching differ from reading a literary text that represents lynching? What can a novel or a poem tell us about violence and the American pysche that a picture postcard cannot? And vice versa? What does it mean for us in the 21st century to view/read about acts of violence from the past?

In your discussion, refer to at least one of the photographs/postcards collected in Without Sanctuary and at least one of the literary texts we have discussed so far this semester. Please post your 250 word responses (roughly two complete paragraphs) on your weblog by 10 p.m. this Tuesday, February 21. Finally, echoing Allen, you must begin your response with "Studying these photos [or one of the course novels or poems] has engendered in me..."