"Policing Stories"
Monday, March 12 / 4 P.M. / FREE
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
Peter Brooks
"Policing Stories"
Monday, March 12 / 4 P.M. / FREE
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
Some recent
books with titles such as Literary Criticisms of the Law, Law's Stories-and
also Law Stories-and Minding the Law suggest that what is commonly referred
to as "law and literature" is becoming a field. At its most effective, "law
and literature" has provided a reading of law as a rhetorical practice, introducing
a certain "hermeneutics of suspicion" into a field that has traditionally claimed
stable, authoritative meanings. Within this move to read law as a rhetorical
practice, one sometimes finds an argument in favor of narrative, principally
a claim that storytelling can be a useful vehicle for conveying the concrete,
particularized experience of those marginalized or excluded by the usual forms
of legal reasoning and decision making. What is curious about this "oppositional
storytelling" movement is that it seems to neglect the omnipresence of narrative
in the law, from the competing stories told in the courtroom on up to the magisterial
narratives unfolded by the Supreme Court. If the narrativity of the law seems
obvious to the outside observer, the law itself does not recognize narrative
as a category of its thinking. Or rather, I shall argue, it recognizes it only
in the form of denial.
Peter Brooks is
Tripp Professor of Humanities, and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center,
Yale University. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including
The Melodramatic Imagination, Reading for the Plot, Body Work, Psychoanalysis
and Storytelling, and, most recently, Troubling Confessions: Speaking
Guilt in Law & Literature.
This event is being co-sponsored by UCSB Interdisciplinary
Humanities Center, Department of English, and Department of French & Italian.
