This talk continues work done in "From ‘Law-and-Literature’ to ‘Law, Literature and Language’: A Comparative Approach” (EJES, 2007) and in "De-Americanizing Law-and-Literature Narratives: Opening up the Story” (Law & Literature, forthcoming). I begin by arguing that specific legal cultures inevitably influence the foci of questions concerning the relationship of law to other aspects of human life. Different scholarly trajectories, moreover, rely implicitly on those genres which best help them to query particularities of their own legal cultures. Germany, the States, and Britain will be taken as test cases.
In a second stage of the argument I willpoint out that the field once called Law-and-Literature has now morphed into a far more porous and pluralistic discipline. The "Literature” in Law-and-Literature has now been replaced by "Culture” or "the Humanities” or "Semiotics” or "Language,” or some combination of the above. With the move from a focus on literature in interface with the law to one on a wider view of the aesthetic and the cultural, the question arises of whether or not there is still room for literature and literary scholarship in broad questionings of legal culture.
This talk examines connections between expressions of Christian belief and the desire to punish persons who are considered to be criminal. It departs from the thesis that despite the constitutionally enshrined separation of church and state, American law and penal actions have traditionally been coached in Christian and, specifically, Protestant terms. Accepting David Garland’s punitivity thesis, the last thirty years have been characterized by increasing public and institutional support for retributive and expressive justice at the expense of efforts to rehabilitate criminals. Moreover, punitive attitudes in America have been enhanced by the sense of victimization that occurred after the attacks on September 11, 2001. A recent surge in Protestant evangelicalism has accompanied the desire to punish criminals draconically. Examples of this include the use of religious imagery in George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ as well as the use and abuse of conversion narratives in murder trials.
The (unholy?) alliance between increasingly punitive attitudes and expressions of Christian belief in the United States is compared to the very different situations in England and Germany. England and Wales maintain one of the harshest systems of justice towards juvenile perpetrators, and the sentencing of this group has grown increasingly hard during the last fifteen years (Barry Goldson). Yet avowed religiousness is not co-aligned with punitive attitudes in England and Wales. And in Germany, where religions enjoy a state-like authority, punitive attitudes remain moderate and religious rhetoric concerning crime is rare. In comparing legal cultures and the use of religious imagery to describe punishment and crime within them, I avoid essentialist notions about religion or law being agents of repression. The alternative relations between law, religiousity, and punitivity described here are presented as stories, alternative ways of making sense of our own legal cultures.
Whereas law-and-literature critics position themselves with regard to major theoretical movements such as post-structuralism, postmodernism, and the so-called ethical turn, an awareness of national and regional differences in their scholarship may go missing. This essay then compares recent law-and-literature work from three countries (the UK, Germany, and the US) to ponder dissimilarities in how scholars pursue the interdiscipline. By enumerating distinctive foci in these countries' related scholarship, the paper moves towards a comparative law-and-literature practice. It questions the degree to which continental European scholarship may differ from work currently being produced in the UK and US and asks if a self-consciousness regarding the particularities of one's own judiciary system is helpful in a scholar's pursuing law-and-literature studies? Moreover, it considers the status of global and regional — to avoid the narrower "national" – law-and-literature studies.
Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy's recent referral to young rioters as "racaille"—alternately translated into English as "rabble" or "scum"—has served as a lightening rod for social debate in France. Those who agree with his no-tolerance policy second his remarks; others argue that his incendiary language functions like the police force's routine harassment of dark-skinned urban youths to criminalize this population group.
Arguably, a similar process occurred during the early modern period in England. As economic conditions led to the growth of a large population of dispossessed young people, laws concerning petty crimes proliferated, punishments for property crimes were made harsher, and a corpus of literature developed that stigmatized vagrants and the poor. Rogue pamphlets listed varieties of men, women, and child thieves, exaggerated their criminal abilities, and warned readers how to avoid falling for their tricks. Contemporaneous London comedies dramatized the antics of urban conmen and gave witness to their supposedly secret language. Such statutes, pamphlets, and plays all worked to create the image of a group of dangerous, well-organized criminals in the public imagination. Attributions of animality to these figures further suggested that criminals were subhuman and biologically marked. The imbrication of law, literature, and science in texts concerning the poor contributed to their criminalization. This process finds unfortunate parallels in the present.
Greta Olson - Professor of English and American Literature and Cultural Studies - University of Giessen
BA Vassar College / University College London (Philosophy / Studio Art)
MA, PhD, and Habilitation University of Freiburg (English / American Studies / Philosophy)