Dramatizing Abu Ghraib’s Plight: A New Historicist Reading of Judith Thompson’s Palace of the End

Abstract

Providing an in-depth understanding of Abu Ghraib’s overwhelming experience through the venue of literature requires a neutral approach of literary criticism and literary theory. In this context, New Historicism, which appears in the last decades of the 20th century via the works of Stephen Greenblatt (1943 – present), seems to be one of the most objective critical approaches that simultaneously interpret literature and history. The proposed paper aims at reflecting on the muffled voices of torture inside Abu Ghraib prison as well as the American sense of Selfness and patriotism by peering into the socio-historical and politico-cultural backgrounds that surround and permeate Judith Thompson’s Palace of the End (2007). The play, arguably speaking, provides a peculiar representation of Abu Ghraib's abusive events through the perspective of the convicted American soldier Lynndie England.