Graphic violence: Assassination and historiography in contemporary fiction

Graphic Violence explores the role of assassination in contemporary historiographic fiction. The introduction begins by outlining the principal questions, and theoretical concerns, of the project. What kind of crisis does the historiographic endeavor entail for fiction? How does violence become synonymous with history, and then an arbiter of fiction's powers? I argue that assassination alternately names and resolves fiction's unsettled relations with the matter of history.; Chapter Two explores the central hermeneutic riddle of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire: the death of John Shade. The uncertain status of that textual event leads not to the delusional play of false images, but to a submerged history of political violence that contaminates even the novel's most innocent deaths. Uncovering a series of dense inter-textual references and historical allusions involving assassination, I argue that Shade's poem and Kinbote's commentary both link textuality to the violence of history.; Chapter Three follows the exterminating logic of Salman Rushdie's Shame, and the connections it establishes between the novel and the nation. In its uneasy relationship to both Partition and Pakistan, Shame sets two forms of violence in tension, assassination and immolation. These alternating modalities are integrated into the novel's gendered politics of form, and constitute Shame's effort to redeem and punish its masculine plot of the postcolonial state.; Chapter Four traces the multiple plot lines of Don DeLillo's Libra to their convergence in a moment of spectacular violence. As assassins emerge from fabricated documents, and conspiracies are complicated by coincidence, Libra probes the limits of its own discursivity. The shattered skull of President Kennedy emerges as the central figure of the novel's ambivalence, whereby materiality becomes visible only through destruction. My conclusion articulates the wider literary context for the historiographic treatment of assassination. Offering two closing readings of non-Anglophone texts, I argue that a concern with violence, epistemology and fiction sustains an international literary conversation.