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“Supreme Fictions”: L. H. LaRue's Constitutional Law as Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 December 2018
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- Review Essay
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- Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1996
References
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2 “Professor Sokol's Bad Joke,”N. Y. Times, 21 May 1996, p. A13.Google Scholar
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8 New York: Warner Books, 1993, p. ix. In thinking my way toward writing this essay, I have much benefited from having the excuse to ask many friends-and some virtual strangers-to give me their off-the-top definitions of fiction. For example, a writer in Jackson, Wyorning, replied to my query that the epigraph in Strip Tease says it all.Google Scholar
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13 The point can be made more formally this way: Indeterminacy in all legal rhetoric (and in literary and poetic rhetorics) is not merely an artificial consequence of constructing a postmodern world. Just the opposite. The observation and experience of indeterminacy (rooted perhaps in our experiencing of Cantor's truth) compel us to reach the illusion of stability and closure through narrative rhetorical devices. This observation in turn makes postmodern theories of knowledge and truth appear more accurate and persuasive than do competing theories.Google Scholar
14 LaRue book thus employs a micro rather than a macro conception of fiction. The book makes no reference to the extensive work distinguishing “fiction” from, say, epic narratives or poetry or dramatic works, nor does it explore how fiction as genre only took the shape we know in the last 100 years. See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), and more generally the essays on fiction theory and criticism in Michael Groden & Martin Kreiswirth, eds., The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism 252–68 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
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21 Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988.Google Scholar