Bad Faith
Tan Fireall, 2023-24 RPW Center Themed Graduate Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “The Place of Memory.”
As we are born, we emerge through a kind of rupture. There is blood, tissue, and sometimes wailing from the pain and perhaps the existential quandary of being born to die. I wonder if this is the moment we are introduced to violence. If so, it is a memory embedded in the fabric of our DNA. This memory of violence yielding life, freedom, and independence has been reenacted over and over again.
For this project, I would like to explore the concept of violence as a social contagion in small communities. In Walter Benjamin’s “Toward the Critique of Violence,” Benjamin writes, “However sacred man is (or however sacred that life in him which is identically present in earthly life, death, and afterlife), there is no sacredness in his condition, in his bodily life vulnerable to injury by his fellow men.”
Through research and building upon the work of thinkers like Fanon, Hartman, Sartre, Arendt, and Benjamin, I hope to discover an apex for the thematic arc and overall discourse of the project, which is the concept that violence of any kind provokes retaliation which ultimately erodes entire communities. My point of entry into this argument is through Aristotle’s tragedy exploring violence as a social contagion and the long-term effect of imperialism, slavery, and the Freudian death drive.
My project takes place in a fictional town where patterns of violence interrupt the dynamics and way of life of the family at the center of the narrative. It is a hybrid piece that examines the limitations of a form-focused discourse. The piece aims to synthesize the concepts above into an interdisciplinary work.
Critical essays with narrative underpinnings allow readers to engage with the material by evoking illuminations and epiphanies and providing a healing experience through modes of storytelling. This hybrid piece incorporates the structure and research of a critical essay with literary influence and poetic language that expresses the urgency of the questions at hand, questions about lineage, identity, race, social class, and the Sisyphysian devastation of violence.
Tan Fireall is a MFA candidate in Poetry. Her research interests span various topics such as film theory, the Renaissance and early modern era, metaphysical poetry, poetics, and science in literature. She is currently researching the theme of violence and victimization within communities. Her research is framed as a critical essay focusing on tragedy as a genre and invites readers to consider the complexities of violence, acts of desecration, and the prevention of burial.