The Wound and the Witness

The Wound and the Witness offers a historically grounded approach to an urgent contemporary problem: the persistence of torture in Western culture. Drawing upon ancient Greek and Roman texts, as well as contemporary media events, Jennifer R. Ballengee explores the spectacle of torture as a persuasive device. She suggests that both torture and the witnessing of torture are forms of polemical writing, carried out on the body. The analysis combines close reading and philological study with a materialist cultural approach to ancient Greek theater, early Christian accounts of martyrdom, and recent political controversies over the interrogation tactics in the U.S. government-run Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib prisons. By incorporating key classical texts by Sophocles, Achilles Tatius, and Prudentius, the author demonstrates how deeply the ancient literature resonates with contemporary issues of the body, rhetoric, and the spectacle of pain.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. The Legal Body:The Symbolic Corpse in Sophocles’Oedipus at Colonus andAntigone

2. The Political Body:Pain and Punishment in Sophocles’Oedipus Rex andOedipus at Colonus

3. The Erotic Body:Mutilation and Desire in Achilles Tatius’sLeukippe and Kleitophon

4. The Moral Body:The Figure of Suffering in Prudentius’sPeristephanon Liber

EPILOGUE
Pain and Public Opinion: The Rhetoric of Torture and the Media

NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX