Bruce Robbins’s “Atrocity: A Literary History”
Eric Newman speaks with Bruce Robbins about his latest book, “Atrocity: A Literary History.”
By LARB Radio HourMarch 21, 2025
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Bruce Robbins’s “Atrocity: A Literary History”
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Eric Newman speaks with Bruce Robbins about his latest book, Atrocity: A Literary History, which explores how literary accounts of mass killing came to shape our collective moral indignation against such violence. Moving from the pre-modern era to the twentieth century, Robbins’s book wrestles with how texts from the Bible to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five reckon–or fail to reckon–with atrocity, drawing out the risks of representing such violence, namely forgetting it altogether or normalizing its horrors.
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The LARB Radio Hour is hosted by Eric Newman, Medaya Ocher, and Kate Wolf.
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