The Rhetoric of Violence in Irvine Welsh's Marabou Stork Nightmares

Abstrakt

This essay argues that rather than glamourising violence with its attendant linguistic registers, Marabou Stork Nightmares critiques Social Darwinism inherent in the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, yet it does not imagine possibilities of resistance and social transformation. Self-referential rhetoric equating right with might in conjunction with Social Darwinism creates the rhetoric of violence that naturalises the horrors of the novel embedded in hierarchical structures of domination on the grounds of race, class, and gender.

Klíčová slova

• Irvine Welsh
• Marabou Stork Nightmares
• Scottish fiction
• violence
• rhetoric
• social Darwinism
• race
• class
• gender