Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- PART I POSSIBILITIES
- PART II PERSPECTIVES
- 4 Shakespeare revisited
- 5 Children's literature and legal ideology
- 6 Law, literature and feminism
- 7 Law and justice in the modern novel: the concept of responsibility
- PART III TWO STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Law and justice in the modern novel: the concept of responsibility
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- PART I POSSIBILITIES
- PART II PERSPECTIVES
- 4 Shakespeare revisited
- 5 Children's literature and legal ideology
- 6 Law, literature and feminism
- 7 Law and justice in the modern novel: the concept of responsibility
- PART III TWO STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
There is no doubt that modern literature has been more extensively used by law and literature scholars than any other literary source. It does not, then, represent a particularly new perspective. There are, of course, certain contemporary ‘modern’ texts which are fresh, and I will look at a couple of these in the final two chapters of this book. However, in this chapter I want briefly to provide an example of how modern literature can be used as a means of accessing certain key concepts in contemporary critical theory and critical legal scholarship. The concept which I shall consider in this chapter is responsibility.
RESPONSIBILITY IN MODERN LITERATURE
Two texts which have proved to be particularly popular in law and literature scholarship are Kafka's The Trial and Camus's The Outsider. The specific concept of responsibility, however, has not received any especial notice. Richard Weisberg used Camus's novels as representative of Nietzschean ressentiment. While admitting the force of the argument that the novels of both Camus and Kafka do present the nihilism of despair, I would suggest that they also reveal the possibilities of responsibility and self-assertion. Most importantly, these texts are not significant for what they might or might not tell us about the specifically legal situation: Austro-Hungarian or French civil procedure. What The Trial and The Outsider actually do is to use the legal situation, and its peculiarly intense concern with motivation of the individual, as a medium for describing the human condition.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Law and LiteraturePossibilities and Perspectives, pp. 142 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995