Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Complicit Silences: Albert Camus
Chapter 2. The Trap of Totalitarianism: Milan Kundera
Chapter 3. Consolation and Complicity: Kazuo Ishiguro
Chapter 4. Traces of Complicity: W. G. Sebald
Chapter 5. Paranoid Conspiracy: Thomas Pynchon
Chapter 6. Compromised Narratives: Margaret Atwood’s Dystopias
Conclusion
Bibliography
Ivan Stacy is associate professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Beijing Normal University.
In recent years, complicity studies have expanded rapidly.
Focussing on failures of witnessing, wilful blindness and culpable
ignorance, Ivan Stacy's The Complicit Text makes a significant
contribution to this burgeoning field. Lucidly argued and
accessibly written, the volume expands our understanding of and our
ability to recognise complicity mainly but not exclusively as it
relates to cultural production. The theoretical framework provides
an intelligent and fresh interpretive angle to key works by Albert
Camus, Milan Kundera, Kazuo Ishiguro, W.G. Sebald and Margaret
Atwood, while implicitly inviting us to probe our own relation to
collective moral wrongdoing.
In this ground-breaking study, Ivan Stacy reassesses the
significance of complicity, as a kind of responsibility beyond that
of a bystander, yet not quite that of a perpetrator, within a
cultural context. He does so by means of careful and convincing
analyses of novels that make visible failures to confront or even
to acknowledge wrong-doing, in contexts ranging from the Holocaust
and the Cold War to ecological emergency and the injustices of
neoliberalism. This study is as timely as it is innovative, on a
topic that concerns us all.
The Complicit Text explores a stunning central premise: the
complicity of ordinary individuals in systems of wrongdoing, if not
oppression, may be a more general feature of the human experience
than many people like to imagine. Ivan Stacy's incisive and highly
accessible case studies identify notable works of literature as
conceptual resources for contemplating the limits or failures of
witnessing, narrative, and testimony in the face of one's
potentially undeniable complicity. The result is a vital scholarly
study that not only draws new significance from important works of
literature, but does so in ways that address the timely question of
how we should narrate our degrees of complicity in present-day
oppression, violence, and injustice.
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