Silence and the Silenced: Interdisciplinary Perspectives comprises a collection of essays from North American and European scholars who examine the various ways in which the theme of silence is developed in literary narratives as well as in such visual media as photography, film, painting, and architecture. The questions of silence and the presence or absence of voice are also explored in the arena of performance, with examples relating to pantomime and live installations. As the book title indicates, two fundamental aspects of silence are investigated: silence freely chosen as a means to deepen meditation and inner reflection and silence that is imposed by external agents through various forms of political repression and censorship or, conversely, by the self in an attempt to express revolt or to camouflage shame. The approaches to these questions range from the philosophical and the psychological to the rhetorical and the linguistic. Together, these insightful reflections reveal the complexity and profundity that surround the function of silence and voice in an aesthetic and social context.

Contents: Keith Grant-Davies: Rhetorical Uses of Silence and Spaces – Ariel Harrod: Sounding Silence, Composing Absence of the Screen and Stage: Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and Samuel Beckett’s – Maria Luisa Chiusa: The Visiting Muse: Antiquity and the Suggestive Power of Silence in the Room Frescoed by Correggio – Lori Yamato: Muted Epigraphs in Kierkegaard’s – Matthew Moore: Cartographic Silences in Brian Friel’s – Paul Peters: Power of the Void: Fascism and Silence in the Poetry of Bertolt Brecht and Paul Celan – Sheelagh Russell-Brown: «To have him all in black»: The ‘Absence’ of Havel in Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe: A Late Cold War Text – Magda Stoinska and Vikki Cecchetto: When the Silencer Is Also the Silenced: The Mechanisms of Self-censorship – Catherine Parayre: Milutin Gubas’s ? Or How to Foster Silence – Sandra Singer: The Image of the Falling Man Revisited – Bruce Elder: Reflections on the Violence of Art – Mark Cauchi (with Wrik Mead and Rui Pimenta): The A/porias of Skin: Secrets and Secretions of Self and Other – Alexandre Avdulov: Listening to the Pines: Japanese Tea Ceremony as a Form of Contemplative Ellipsis – Elisa Segnini: A Silent Language: Reflections on «Pure» and «Uncorrupted» Pantomime – Anton Jansen: When a Singer Must Be Silenced – Carol Merriam: Keeping Your Mouth Shut: How To Be a Good Mistress (Silenced Women in Latin Elegy) – Kathleen Garay: Speaking Saintly Silence in the Thirteenth Century: the Case of Elizabeth of Hungary – Index