Rhetoric and evidence : legal conflict and literary representation in U.S. American culture / / Peter Schneck

• Autore: Schneck Peter <1960->
• Pubblicazione: Berlin ; ; Boston, : Walter de Gruyter, 2011
• Edizione: 1st ed.
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (300 p.)
• Disciplina: 810.9/3554
• Soggetto topico: American literature - History and criticism; Law in literature; Law and literature - United States - History; Law in mass media
• Classificazione: HR 1520
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references.
• Nota di contenuto: Front matter -- Acknowledgements -- Table of Contents -- Chapter 1. Law, Literature, and the Predicament of Representation -- Chapter 2. Legitimate Fictions: Rhetoric and Evidence in the Law-and-Literature Movement -- Chapter 3 Wieland 's Testimony: Charles Brockden Brown and the Rhetoric of Evidence -- Chapter 4. The Judge and the Code: James Fenimore Cooper and the Common Law of Literature -- Chapter 5. Evidence and Identification: The Case(s) of To Kill a Mockingbird -- Chapter 6. Dissenting Opinions: William Gaddis, Alan Dershowitz, and the Spectacles of Media Justice -- Bibliography
• Sommario/riassunto: The book traces the changing relation and intense debates between law and literature in U.S. American culture, using examples from the 18th to the 20th century (including novels by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Harper Lee, and William Gaddis). Since the early American republic, the critical representation of legal matters in literary fictions and cultural narratives about the law served an important function for the cultural imagination and legitimation of law and justice in the United States. One of the most essential questions that literary representations of the law are concerned with, the study argues, is the unstable relation between language and truth, or, more specifically, between rhetoric and evidence. In examining the truth claims of legal language and rhetoric and the evidentiary procedures and protocols which are meant to stabilize these claims, literary fictions about the law aim to provide an alternative public discourse that translates the law's abstractions into exemplary stories of individual experience. Yet while literature may thus strive to institute itself as an ethical counter narrative to the law, in order to become, in Shelley's famous phrase "the legislator of the world", it has to face the instability of its own relation to truth. The critical investigation of legal rhetoric in literary fiction thus also and inevitably entails a negotiation of the intrinsic value of literary evidence.
• Titolo autorizzato: Rhetoric and evidence
• ISBN: 1-283-43010-X; 9786613430106; 3-11-025377-1
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910807329303321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II
• Serie: Law & Literature