Original scientific paper
Alice Walker’s Meridian and the Question of Just Violence
Jelena Šesnić
orcid.org/0000-0002-4276-3490
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
At a time of growing interest in questions of ethics in contemporary theory, this article
suggests a broader understanding and offers a historical perspective of the ethical
implications which from the start have been presupposed in US ethnic literatures. Alice
Walker’s Civil-Right’s Bildungsroman Meridian (1976), with its entangled implications
relative to the issues of violence, revolution, social and personal transformation, is a
case in point. These concerns potentially work at cross purposes, but the argument of
this paper outlines the problematic possibility that some forms of violence, if ritualized,
circumscribed and symbolized appropriately, as suggested by models of Freudian
psychoanalysis (as outlined in Totem and Taboo), Julia Kristeva’s model of abjection,
and René Girard’s sacrificial anthropology, offer modes of regarding violence as
just, that is, responsive to ethical concerns. Such a redefinition of violence also takes
place in conjunction with, rather than separate from, narrower aesthetic concerns, as
proposed further by Elaine Scarry, Terry Eagleton and, again, Julia Kristeva, given
their work at the intersection of ethics and symbolic forms.
Keywords
US ethnic literature; violence; ethics; aesthetics; Meridian
Hrčak ID:
61577
URI
Publication date:
15.4.2010.
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