5 - Nature as Paradox: Brecht's Exile Lyric

Summary

Law and Literature

WORKING BETWEEN DISCIPLINES ought not to mean simply blurring their boundaries, or worse, colonizing one discipline by means of another. Yet this is what a great deal of recent literary studies has done, indulging in deluded assertions of juridical omnipotence over other fields, which grow all the louder the more quixotically isolated and jargonridden literary scholarship becomes. Against this tendency, interdisciplinarity ought to serve as a healthy curb to those sorts of totalizing fantasies, as a gentle reminder of the limits of purely rhetorical analysis. History and society are not, after all, just texts.

The by now considerable field of law and literature is a case in point. Through all the volume of work produced, one detects a common strand of argument best summed up by the initiator of the field:

To attend wholeheartedly to the central rhetorical and ethical questions — who we make ourselves in our speech and writing, what relations we establish with our language and with other people — is, I believe, to attend to the first questions of justice. If we address these questions well, good answers will emerge to the secondary questions too, for implicit in any tolerable response to them are standards of justice — attitudes toward ourselves and others — that will inform what we say and do far better than any a priori theory or empirical science could do. If we can get our voice and sense of audience right, everything else we care about, or should care about, will follow.