“Why study literature in professional school?” people have asked when I said that I work in a discipline called law-and-literature. I usually reply, “For the same reason we study math from elementary school until college: to learn about ‘truth.’”

The concept of “truth” has become the subject of ridicule. The postmodern era of scholarship, with its roots in poststructuralism, deconstruction, and narratology, ushered in new conceptions of metaphysics and ontology: all texts, indeed all things emanating from texts, whether cultural norms or social values, are at variance with themselves. Nothing has essential meaning; everything is indeterminate and arbitrary. The self-evident “meaning” perceived by individuals is socially constructed, having been centered or passed down through networks of people and events. These, at any rate, are the simplistic accusations put forth by those fed up with postmodernist presuppositions.

I’m no enemy of postmodernism, but I tend to agree with French theorist Bruno Latour, who claims that we have never been modern, so we cannot have been postmodern, and besides, there is something to this concept of “truth.”  Why else would we have mathematics? Mathematics, like literature, has the capacity to bring about answers. True answers. Postmodernism has never quite debunked this truth-seeking field. Read the rest of this entry »