Full Description
This book is the first monograph to critically evaluate the work of the literary scholar René Girard from the perspectives of Law and Literature and Law and Film Studies, two of the most multidisciplinary branches of critical legal theory. The central thesis is that Girard's theory of the scapegoat mechanism provides a wholly new and original means of re-conceptualizing the nature of judicial modernity, which is the belief that modern Law constitutes an internally coherent and exclusively secular form of rationality.
The book argues that it is the archaic scapegoat mechanism - the reconciliation of the community through the direction of unified violence against a single victim - that actually works best in explaining all of the outstanding issues of Law and Literature in both of its sub-forms: law-as-literature (the analysis of legal language and practice exemplified by literacy texts) and law-in-literature (the exploration of issues in legaltheory through the fictitious form of the novel).
The book will provide readers with: (i) a useful introduction to the most important elements of the work of René Girard; (ii) a greater awareness of the 'hidden' nature of legal culture and reasoning within a post-secular age; and (iii) a new understanding of the 'subversive' (or 'enlightening') nature of some of the most iconic works on Law in both Literature and Cinema, media which by their nature allow for the expression of truths repressed by formal legal discourse.
Contents
Rene Girard, Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, and the goat song of Tragoidia.- 'El sueno de la razon produce monstruos' or, 'the dream of reason creates monsters': Two little piggies went to the Apocalypse in William Golding's Lord of the Flies.- 'Does anybody know anything about the law?': White male grown-ups in the wilderness and their regression to the state of nature in James Dickey's Deliverance.- 'A little law and order wouldn't hurt anybody around here': The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and High Noon.- 'A woman only loves a real man': Metaphysical desire and the crisis of undifferentiation in Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Rashomon.- 'I just want to talk...': Liberalism, generative unanimity, and post-sacrificial scapegoating in 12 Angry Men.- 'You must always point...': The Post-Heroic Lawyer as scapegoat and scapegoater in Presumed Innocent, The Verdict, and Cape Fear.- The telling of lies and the casting of lots: Franz Kafka's The Trial and the eternal un-decidability of the scapegoat.- '...Why do we, all of us, have to keep judging and being judged?': The scapegoat and the scapegoater in Albert Camus' The Stranger and The Fall.- 'Out There': Monstrous doubles and the folie a deux in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.- The Good Murderer Gary Gilmore: The re-sacralization of the scapegoat in the age of public reason.- Spare a Thought for the Hangman: The apocalypse of Rene Girard.
