Conexiones Literarias Interculturales: Tratamiento Cómico de la Violencia en Beryl Bainbridge y John Hawkes

Abstract

Since World War II British and American writers, disenchanted with tradition, have created works that reject the boundaries set forth by those traditions. They see the modern world so fragmented and chaotic that it can no longer be described by the ordered conventions. But if contemporary fiction is apocalyptic and disruptive, its comic treatment of violence has produced a complex tone in which the comic vision is used to suggest hope. Two of the truly gifted writers in the so-called black humor, or comic treatment of violence, are the American John Hawkes and the British Beryl Bainbridge. The comic mode in their novel s is closely related to the centrality of death, and this combination explains the attraction-repulsion antithesis of our response to their major characters.