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Law and the Humanities: Cultural Perspectives
This volume investigates interdisciplinary intersections between law and the humanities from the Renaissance to the present day. It allows for fruitful encounters between different disciplines: from literature to science, from the visual arts to the post-human, from the postmodern novel’s experimentation to most recent approaches towards the legal interpretation of literary texts. This productive dialogue fosters original perspectives in the interpretation of and reflection upon identity, justice, power and human rights and values, thus underlining the role of literature in the articulation of relevant cultural issues pertaining to specific periods.
Performing the Renaissance Body
In the Renaissance period the body emerges as the repository of social and cultural forces and a privileged metaphor for political practices and legal codification. Due to its ambivalent expressive force, it represents the seat and the means for the performance of normative identity and at the same time of alterity. The essays of the collection address the manifold articulations of this topic, demonstrating how the inscription of the body within the discursive spheres of gender identity, sexuality, law, and politics align its materiality with discourses whose effects are themselves material. The aesthetic and performative dimension of law inform the debates on the juridical constitution of authority, as well as its reflection on the formation and the moulding of individual subjectivity. Moreover, the inherently theatrical elements of the law find an analogy in the popular theatre, where juridical practices are represented, challenged, occasionally subverted or created. The works analyzed in the volume, in their ample spectre of topics and contexts aim at demonstrating how in the Renaissance period the body was the privileged focus of the social, legal and cultural imagination.
Citizenship, Law and Literature
This edited volume is the first to focus on how concepts of citizenship diversify and stimulate the long-standing field of law and literature, and vice versa. Building on existing research in law and literature as well as literature and citizenship studies, the collection approaches the triangular relationship between citizenship, law and literature from a variety of disciplinary, conceptual and political perspectives, with particular emphasis on the performative aspect inherent in any type of social expression and cultural artefact. The sixteen chapters in this volume present literature as carrying multifarious, at times opposing energies and impulses in relation to citizenship. These range from providing discursive arenas for consolidating, challenging and re-negotiating citizenship to directly interfering with or inspiring processes of law-making and governance. The volume opens up new possibilities for the scholarly understanding of citizenship along two axes: Citizenship-as-Literature: Enacting Citizenship and Citizenship-in-Literature: Conceptualising Citizenship.
The Transparency Paradox
Transparency has become a new norm. States, international organizations, and even private businesses have sought to bolster their legitimacy by invoking transparency in their activities. This growth in popularity was made possible through two interconnected trends: the idea that transparency is inherently good, and that the actual meaning of the term is becoming harder and harder to pin down. Thus far, this has remained undertheorized. The Transparency Paradox is an insightful account of the hidden logic of the ideal of transparency and its legal manifestations. It shows how transparency is a covertly conflicted ideal. The book argues that counter to popular understanding, truth and legitimacy cannot but form a problematic trade-off in transparency practices.
Diaspora, Law and Literature
The well-known challenges of international migration have triggered new departures in academic approaches, with 'diaspora studies' evolving as an interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary field of study. Its emerging methodology shares concerns with another interdisciplinary field, the study of the relations between law and literature, which focuses on the ways in which the two cultural practices of law and literature mutually negotiate each other and on the question after the ontological commensurability of the domains. This volume offers, for the first time, an attempt to provide an interface between these overlapping interdisciplinary endeavours of literary studies, legal studies, and diaspora studies. In doing so, it explores new approaches and invites new perspectives on diasporas, migration and the disciplines that study them, hopefull also adding to the cultural resources of coping with a swiftly changing social landscape in a globalizing world.
Symbolism
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Bioethics and Biolaw through Literature
In recent years, the well-established field of human anthropology has been put under scrutiny by the new data offered by science and technology. Scientific intervention into human life through organ transplants, euthanasia, genetic engineering, experiments connected to the genetic code and the genome, and varied other biotechnologies have placed ethical beliefs into question and created ethical dilemmas. These scientific inventions influence our views on birth and death, on the construction of the body and its technical reproducibility, and have problematized the concept of the human persona. The purpose of bioethics, the science of life, is to find new values and norms which will be valid f...
Monsters and Monstrosity
Every culture knows the phenomenon of monsters, terrifying creatures that represent complete alterity and challenge every basic notion of self and identity within a cultural paradigm. In Latin and Greek culture, the monster was created as a marvel, appearing as something which, like transgression itself, did not belong to the assumed natural order of things. Therefore, it could only be created by a divinity responsible for its creation, composition, goals and stability, but it was triggered by some in- or non-human action performed by humans. The identification of something as monstrous denotes its place outside and beyond social norms and values. The monster-evoking transgression is most of...
Memory, Imagination and Desire in Contemporary Anglo-American Literature and Film
This volume offers a series of analyses on the renewed interest of western culture in themes and aesthetic proposals that either look back to the past or recreate future worlds. The turn of the century has witnessed artistic efforts to reconsider past literary and cinematographic forms and adapt them to the new social concerns of contemporary artists and readers/viewers. Similarly, science-fiction and utopian narratives have attempted to reshape the world as we know it and speculate about the mysteries the future might hold for us. This book includes contributions that focus on and problematise the dialogue between past, present and future in literary works and films produced within the English-speaking context in the last two decades of the 20th century. It is divided in five sections - maps of the postmodern, the postcolonial experience, stories revisited, popular narrative genres and views of the future - which attempt to include all the motifs associated with that dialogue, from the interaction of memory and history to the reformulation of old stories and forms, or the representation of dystopian and utopian futures.
