Endnote: Untoward

in the name of trauma: notes on testimony, truth telling and the secret of literature in south africa

2013

I cannot claim to be one of the founding scholars in law and literature—for an explanation of how law and literature as a ‘movement’ arose, there are accounts of this to be found, particularly in relation to the American scene—with Benjamin Cardozo, for example, making explicit acknowledgement of writers as fundamental sources of understanding in law and implicitly of law itself. More recently, James Boyd White in the 1970’s in recognizing the link between the worlds of law and of literature both as a source of analogous narrative models and in the shared investment in critical, deconstructive processes. Later commentary has recognized law and literature as just one aspect of the larger ‘critical legal studies’ movement, claiming the political agenda of exposing the impossibility of neutrality and law as essentially political. However, I feel rather resistant to the categorizing tendency—of sourcing a ‘history’ or a ‘movement’ or even a ‘discipline’ of law and literature. For exampl...

Interdisciplinary scholarship in law and literature is commonly theorized as a relationship of supplementarity, where each discipline’s capacity to offer what the other lacks is regarded as a sign of value. The most common configuration of this relationship accords humanizing attributes to literature and rational, mechanistic truth to law. While each discipline is considered to enhance the other in a positive, cumulative manner in this discourse, literature is characterized as a subaltern, yet necessary additive for law to attain wholeness. Although the above view has shifted with the development of law and literature movement to embrace more nuanced readings, the tendency to posit law and literature in a supplemental configuration persists, projecting a ‘humanist real’ onto literature and a ‘political real’ onto law. This chapter undertakes an analysis of the ways in which this discourse is deployed in law and literature scholarship, suggesting that the supplement can never be regarded simply as an additive that offers plenitude as often presupposed in the theorizing of law and literature scholarship. The more nuanced and “undecidable” meaning of the term as an ‘inferior substitute’ or that which marks an absence in a Derridian sense points to the ways in which the myth of plenitude in reading law in literature can be destabilized. Although both these interrelated significations of the term are employed in theorizing the relationship between law and literature, its second meaning remains under erasure by the first, largely shaping the discourse thus far. This chapter further suggests that the discourse of supplementarity remains particularly inadequate in theorizing the relationship between law and postcolonial literatures.

2013

This book combines legal as well as political and theoretical questions in a variety of contexts, ranging from legal issues in the early modern period to critical explorations of law/s, justice and textuality in contemporary literature and culture. The essays in this volume offer critical perspectives on the role of literature and theory in relation to the law and explore otherness and justice in early modern, Victorian and contemporary texts, postmodern theory, colonial and postcolonial contexts and popular culture. Examining how legal and literary narratives construct, repress, legitimise, but also enable the Other, this volume offers new insights into forms of alterity, marginality and exclusion and articulates the imperative need to reconfigure issues of justice as always intertwined with the Other.

2002

Like Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799) and Amelia Opie’s Father and Daughter (1801) are experimental fictions that require the reader’s identification with a sexualized heroine marked as transgressive and persecuted by society. Indeed, as I suggest in the first chapter, Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman models the rebellious and outspoken Romantic heroine I am delineating. In many ways, Maria Venables represents an extreme of the type; she leaves her husband, takes a lover, and presents her case for divorce to a court of law. Her suit fails, but it is a noble failure. Furthermore, as Tilottama Rajan has taught us to recognize, Wollstonecraft’s unfinished narrative invites its readers to “complete the text by unfolding a truth it does not yet contain” (“Wollstonecraft and Godwin” 223). As I note in the Coda to Chapter 1, The Wrongs of Woman was published with six different endings, all drawn from the author’s working notes, most of w...

Law & Literature, 2015

This article focuses on the significance of practices of representation to law's role in adjudicating harm-both the role of representation in the adjudication of past harms, and in law's present-day assertions of authority. I focus in particular on the ways in which questions of harm to the person, relation to land, and sovereignty have been separated in law, and the effects of these practices in constructing legal authority. I turn to Wright's The Swan Book (2013) to provide a reading of the "undoing" of narratives of harm based on the person, and to thereby critique law's representations of harm. I argue that, as an anti-elegy in the Modernist tradition, Wright's novel provides a metaphor of harm and responsibility that reorganises time, destabilises law's claims to authority over the adjudication of harms, and queries law's claim to authority over other legal systems and sovereignties. This reading takes the framework of harm beyond the personal, to include the violent histories that have produced legal concepts including "land," "sovereignty" and even "law" itselfhistories and contexts that are separated and obscured in law.

American Literary History

Philosophical Papers, 2008