WN: This is definitely worthwhile reading!
An excerpt:
It is sometimes said that the post-modern age is the post-Holocaust age — the age of humanity trying to comprehend the horrific depths of its own violence. Or is it? The post-modern age is also one that might be said to have become preoccupied with texts — to the point of analyzing them down to the letters, the signs, of which they are constituted. If we can no longer get beyond texts to “reality,” then post-modernism might instead be a clever way to avoid being confronted by our violence once again. We can seemingly find violence in our texts, but we cannot get to a better understanding of “real” violence in the “real” world, of human beings doing violence. A wholistic kind of learning to not do violence tends to be narrowed down to learning how to purge our language of its violence.
Please click on: René Girard – The Anthropology of the Cross as Alterrnative to Post-Modern Literary Criticism
