Conceptualizations of Forgiveness as a Way of Exploring a Text’s Implied Worldview
Forgiveness is often recognized as a general human phenomenon. It occurs across all
cultures and societies and is seen as a positive force, a way of freeing oneself from a life determined by past actions.
While this is certainly true, such a view might overlook the fact that forgiveness is also a deeply cultural act. It is embedded in a socio-cultural environment and informed by culture- specific assumptions that determine, among other things, what needs to be forgiven, who needs to ask for forgiveness, and who holds the power to forgive. Viewed in this way, the act of forgiveness becomes a signpost to a community’s implied worldview—at least to the extent that a given culture is the “embodiment of a worldview” (APA, 380).
It is this understanding of forgiveness that guides the analysis in my JNT-essay “Trying to Make Amends: Forms of Forgiveness and Implied Values in Graham Swift’s Last Orders and Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend.” Based on the assumption that literary texts imply worldviews, the essay identifies those values that are implicitly negotiated by the respective novel’s conceptualizations of forgiveness.
The essay is an expression of my fascination with forgiveness. For a long time, I was
convinced that the way a person asked for or granted forgiveness was a king’s road to
understanding their psychological makeup. This idea has changed with the research for this essay. In a way, forgiveness is similar to love. We may experience our love lives as the clearest expression of our uniqueness. However, as Eva Illouz shows, they are, at least equally, an expression of our socio-cultural belonging. I believe the same is true for forgiveness. Hence, analyzing a text in terms of its conceptualization of forgiveness can help explore the cultural assumptions tacitly negotiated in a literary text. In short, such an analysis can help uncover a text’s implied worldview.
American Psychological Association. “Guidelines for Multicultural Education, Training,
Research, Practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists.” American Psychologist,
58, 2003, pp. 377–402.
