Greta Olson

Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators

Why do we fail to trust some narrators, and why do the tales other narrators tell strike us as incomplete? How do the phenomena of untrustworthy and fallible narra tion function within fictional texts, and how do readers respond to these kinds of nar ration? In this essay I will address these questions by reviewing Wayne Booths introduction of the term unreliable narrator and his explication of unreliable narra tion as a function of irony, since this formulation remains the leading model for un reliable narration. I will then describe how Booths text-immanent model of narrator

De-Americanizing Law and Literature Narratives: Opening Up the Story

Abstract This essay names differences between stories told in American, British, and German legal cultures in an effort to de-Americanize prevailing modes of Law and Literature scholarship. It quibbles with the reliance on American models of scholarship in derivative European Law and Literature research as well as with much American work. The latter assumes the universality of the adversarial trial system, the ubiquity of the debate about how to interpret the Constitution, and the variety of social and civil rights issues such interpretation entails as well as the common law tradition of arguing through precedent. To explore the limitations inherent in prevailing modes of scholarship, the essay compares the story lines that inflect three nations’ modes of conducting Law and Literature. It concludes by describing scholarly dead ends in Law and Literature as well as points of expansion. The latter include the move to regard law as a cultural practice and to embrace the visual and the aesthetic in a more generous notion of the literary.

The Turn to Passion: Has Law and Literature become Law and Affect?

Abstract Affect, this essay argues, has replaced literature as the other of law in law and literature. It begins with a survey of the influence of affect theory in posthumanism, queer theory, history, sociology, the new materialism, and narratology, arguing that “affect” – an umbrella term that describes assemblages of nodes, waves, materials, and intensities – has replaced Foucauldian “discourse” as the leading term in current critical commentary. The consequences of this affective turn for law and literature scholarship and conceptions of legal personhood are then explored. Whereas a more traditional view proposes that laws task is to mediate humans’ worst passions and sublate affectively particular conflicts, newer work contends that law is a source of pain rather than its antidote. This entails an end to law and literature as we have known it. Examples of alternative justice offered through literary narratives are now deemed less productive in querying legalist prescription than non-linguistic and non-narratively constructed phenomena. Literatures function of providing “a narrative supplement” to the law has been displaced by anti-narrative explorations of the visual, the haptic, and the experiential that demonstrate laws hidden emotionality and its use of emotional tropes towards ideological ends. This brings text- and linguistic-based law-and-literature work into radical question.

Towards a politics of form

Chantal Mouffe has repeatedly argued that every artistic form has a political dimension. In one iteration of this argument (2013: 91), the political theorist writes that ‘artistic practices play a role in the constitution and maintenance of a given symbolic order, or in its challenging, and this is why they necessarily have a political dimension’. Before her, Fredric Jameson (1981: 81) proposed to read ‘the literary text in such a way that the latter may itself be seen as the rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or ideological subtext’, that is, as a textual rendering of a given historical moment. For Jameson, aesthetic forms are inherently ideological, involving fantastical resolutions of current social contradictions as well as ‘sedimented’ forms of earlier such resolutions. Further, the usual protocols for interpreting a literary text represent sedimentations of ‘its previous readings and its accumulated institutional interpretation’ that function as ‘forms of the conceptual legitimation of this society’ (Jameson et al., 1982: 72–3). Jameson thus highlights the necessity of reading not only aesthetic forms but also modes of interpretation in politically acute ways. Before Jameson, Ian Watt (1957) located the expression and performance of middle-class bourgeois ideology in the narrative prose typical of the novel. Subsequently, and more in the spirit of Mouffe’s constitution than Jameson’s sedimentation, Joseph Slaughter (2007) has posited that the narrative form of the Bildungsroman has lent shape to human rights discourse and law, leading not only to calls for the recognition of individual and group rights but also to exclusions of those who are not incorporated into rights-lending sovereignties. Building on this work on the sedimentation, constitution and maintenance of the political in the aesthetic, this special issue seeks to unite the formalist analysis of texts with readings that aim to uncover how structures of social power are expressed in and by, as well as challenged by, aesthetic forms. More broadly, the politics of form1 begins to address the need for the development of a political analysis of aesthetic and narrative forms, to articulate specific models and methods for performing such analysis and to reflect on the politics of the work that is thereby undertaken.2 Specifically, our desire is to politicise narratological and formal analysis while retaining the form specificity that has been a feature of narratology. The attentive reader shall note that there has been no talk of ‘literature’ thus far or of the ‘literary’, but rather of narrative and aesthetic texts. ‘Narrative’ here is understood to exist along a continuum of texts and phenomena and to refer to those that more or less allow themselves to be narrativised, that is, to be cognitively processed as stories or as having story-like elements, or narrativity, that trigger the story-detecting processes in those who interact with them. Highly narrative texts tend to have more verbal elements, yet

'Like a Dog': Rituals of Animal Degradation in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Abu Ghraib Prison

����� ��� The revelation of prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib during the spring and summer of 2004 confronted U.S. Americans with the devastating repercussions of the Bush administration’s foreign policy after the attacks of 11 September 2001. The photographs from Abu Ghraib presented critical thinkers with a number of moral and aesthetic problems. They forced us to ask how one could reconcile the ideology of spreading democracy with the practices of rendition, extrajudicial incarceration, and torture. The photographs also made us ponder how suffering and death caused by torture could be discussed in non-voyeuristic ways. The collective witnessing in 2011 of the tenth anniversary of ‘9/11,’ including the many efforts to memorialize the attacks by framing them within narratives of U.S.American exceptionalism, demonstrated the continued pertinence of these issues. This essay employs J. M. Coetzee’s Booker prize-winning 1999 novel, Disgrace, as an intertext to ‘read’ photos of prisoner abuse and torture from Abu Ghraib.1Working through the novel’s treatment of animals and figurations of animality demonstrates how humans displace human forms of violence onto non-human animals in order to exculpate themselves from responsibility. The representation of Disgrace’s David Lurie’s and other characters’ recourse to animal metaphors and metonyms to justify human cruelty illustrates the type of thinking that lay at the basis of treat

Law is not Turgid and Literature not Soft and Fleshy: Gendering and Heteronormativity in Law and Literature Scholarship

Abstract This essay uncovers a pattern of gendering in Law and Literature research that has contributed to limited understandings of the disciplines, taken singly, as well as to the projection of a heteronormative script on their relations to one another. This includes the troping of literature as feminine and that of law as masculine, and the emplotment of their relationship as that of an initially antagonistic yet ultimately satisfying heterosexual romance. Accordingly, actual forms of discrimination towards women are confused with contradictory images of a feminised literature as an empathetic, eloquent and morally superior woman. This idealised image of literature is figured as initially suffering under the regime of rationalistic, masculinised law but then reforming ‘him’ through the power of love. To posit law as a man and literature as a woman is to elide their similarities and reify their differences. After assembling evidence of gendering in US American Law and Literature work and to a lesser degree in British critical jurisprudence, the essay outlines historical reasons for why it is problematic to think of literature as morally uplifting and feminine and law as ‘brutish’ and masculine. Instances of ethical and contingent applications of law speak against any monolithic narrative that suggests that literature is inherently more morally conscious. Literature has proven to be a privileged forum for doing the police work of enforcing the gender binary as well as for maintaining other social divisions. In closing, the essay describes strategies to degender Law and Literature in an effort to move the conversation forward.