How to Live? Guilt and Goodness in Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart

Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart is a painful analysis of communal guilt and personal responsibility in the context of the (often paradoxical) complex race relationships in South Africa. This paper aims to create a dialogic connection between Malan's narrative and Philippa Foot's discussion of guilt and responsibility in her widely acclaimed book on moral philosophy, Natural Goodness (2001). By bringing together Foot's moral philosophy and Malan's autobiographical, socially engaged literary work in a dialogic framework, this paper hopes to show that Foot provides an illuminating foundation for Malan's question of "how to live," and that Malan's realistic examples provide illustrations as well as new challenges for Foot's theoretical views. The dialogue is situated in the critical and literary context of the discussion of culpability in contemporary South-African literature

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology) · Criminology · Culpability · Dialogic · Epistemology · Literature · Moral responsibility · Narrative · Repertoire · Situated · Sociology · African cultural and philosophical studies · History · Legal Issues in South Africa · Philosophy · South African History and Culture

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