Be(com)ing Dispossessed: Relationality and Violence in Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospels
This paper delves into Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospels (2013) as a biographical novel that draws on the official Gospels to address current issues. Focusing on the sections on Miryam (the Jewish spelling for the Virgin) and Barabbas, dispossession turns out to be the central subject, related to...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2017-10-01
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| Series: | Études Britanniques Contemporaines |
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| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/3924 |
| Summary: | This paper delves into Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospels (2013) as a biographical novel that draws on the official Gospels to address current issues. Focusing on the sections on Miryam (the Jewish spelling for the Virgin) and Barabbas, dispossession turns out to be the central subject, related to relationality in the former case and to violence in the latter. Hence, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s concept of dispossession as a bifurcation of Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethics of alterity and Slavoj Žižek’s conception of violence constitute the theoretical framework of the analysis. With all this in mind, my main contention is that in Alderman’s novel acts of dispossession and violence are redirected towards ethical relationality and reconciliation between Jewishness and Christianity. |
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| ISSN: | 1168-4917 2271-5444 |