back

Law and Literature

• Editor with Martin Kayman (Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff) of the European Journal of English Studies issue on "Law, Literature, and Language," Vol. 11, Issue 1 (Routledge), 2007.
http://www.essenglish.org/ejes.html

• Co-founder with Professor Jeanne Gaakeer (Legal Theory, Rotterdam) of the European Network for Law and Literature (www.eurnll.org). Please contact Jeanne Gaakeer or Greta to be included: eurnll@law.eur.nl.

• Member of the German Research Foundation Project "Law, Norm and Criminalization"
http://www.mpicc.de/ww/de/pub/forschung/forschungsarbeit/kriminologie/recht_norm_kriminalisierun/anglistik.htm

• Paper on "Towards a Comparative Law and Literature Practice" for the seminary Literature and Law: An Interdisciplinary Approach at the annual meeting of the European Society for the Study of English 8, London (August 2006).

ABSTRACT: 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.


• Paper on "Criminalizing the Poor: Convergences of Law, Literature, and Reporting in the Early Modern Period" for the panel "Law and Literature" at: Close Encounters: Science Literature Arts, Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (June 2006) Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis

ABSTRACT: 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.