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Why Are Stories Violent?

David Thorburn Kevin Sandler Maria Tatar: May 7, 2005; Running Time: 1:19:48

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Note: Due to copyright restrictions, this video does not include the film clips screened by Professor Sandler. His presentation includes sufficient description and context to make the argument clear.

You wouldn’t ordinarily expect to find Euripides, Snow White, Bruno Bettelheim, and Rambo discussed at the same event. But they share the limelight in this session. Is violence an intrinsic part of human art and experience? A device exploited by cynical producers to lure consumers? A threat to healthy child development, or a natural means of teaching and learning? There is no consensus here, but plenty of provocative examples and scholarly insight. David Thorburn sets the stage, evoking the relentless tradition of violence in the Western literary canon from the eras of the Bible and Greek tragedy.

Kevin Sandler, who dubs himself a “political media economist,” fills out the contemporary end of the continuum, with an analysis of ratings handed out by the film industry board. Using “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Collateral Damage” as evidence, Sandler argues that major studios have positioned violence as an entertainment vehicle safely within the “cultural function” we expect movies to fulfill.

What about Snow White’s poisoned apple, or the cruelties Willy Wonka inflicts on chocolate factory visitors? Literary scholar Maria Tatar lays out three possible functions of violence in stories for children: stimulating their imagination through surreal depictions of “what might be;” teaching them how to behave through fear; and giving them a therapeutic outlet for primitive emotions. A series of lively questioners try to penetrate what Tatar calls the “mystery of cultural effects,” speculating on the psychological, social, and political consequences of so much violence in children’s media.

Lecture Details

Location: Bartos Theater

About the Speakers

David Thorburn

MIT Professor of Literature
MacVicar Faculty Fellow Director, MIT Communications Forum

David Thorburn has published widely on literary and cultural subjects and is currently completing a cultural history of American television, called Story Machine. He received his A.B. degree from Princeton, his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford and taught at Yale for 10 years before joining MIT in 1976. He has edited collections of essays on romanticism, and on John Updike, as well as a widely used anthology of fiction, Initiation. He is a former Director of the Film and Media Studies Program and of the Cultural Studies Project.

Kevin Sandler

Assistant Professor, Media Industries, The University of Arizona

Kevin Sandler specializes in U.S popular media, censorship, and animation. His forthcoming books include, The Naked Truth: Why Hollywood Does Not Make NC-17 Films (Rutgers University Press, 2005) and Scooby Doo (Duke University Press, 2006). He is the academic spokesperson for the Cartoon Network.

Maria Tatar

Harvard College Professor and John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures Dean for the Humanities

Maria Tatar received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1971 and has taught at Harvard since then. Her teaching and research interests include Weimar Germany, German romanticism, folklore, children's literature, and cultural studies.

Tatar has written books on the Brothers Grimm, on fairy tales (The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales and Off with Their Heads!), and on the cultural impact of mesmerist theories and practices of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. She has also authored Lustmord, which explores the theme of sexual violence in the literature, film, and art of the Weimar period in Germany. Tatar has edited an anthology of fairy tales published as a Norton Critical Edition. She is currently at work on a book about the Bluebeard tale.

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