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Archive for the ‘Arts & Letters’ Category

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Creative Destruction, by Troy Camplin

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Poetry on May 6, 2011 at 7:37 pm
The following poem by Troy Camplin first appeared at Austrian Economics and Literature.
 
 
 
Troy Camplin holds a Ph.D. in humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas.  He has taught English in middle school, high school, and college, and is currently taking care of his children at home. He is the author of Diaphysics, an interdisciplinary work on systems philosophy; other projects include the application of F.A. Hayek’s spontaneous order theory to ethics, the arts, and literature. His play, “Almost Ithacad,” won the PIA Award from the Cyberfest at Dallas Hub Theater.  

 

Creative Destruction

The forest fills with underbrush, dead-
Wood tangling even shrew legs, tiny bones
The evidence, if you could see them. Red,
Burned in the sun, the grass dries on the stones.A gale whips up the grass and dust, a cloud
Emerges, lightning strikes, the flames leap out,
The heat and flames create a dance—they’re proud
Of what they’re doing, live without a doubt.

And in their aftermath, the ground is black,
The brush is gone, the trees, alive, are charred—
Destruction’s all that anyone can track—
They’re sure destruction like this should be barred.

But with the rains, the black gives hints of green,
And with the newfound light upon the ground,
New life can spring up and at last be seen,
And even deer have room enough to bound.

The space between the trees is filled with pink
And scarlet, tall fringed orchids share the field
With cardinal flowers taller still. Both link
A newborn network, building a new yield.

And soon the trees are leafing out and shade
The space beneath—a new environment
Is born, where bluets bloom, ferns fill the glade,
Each using what the last sun-flowers lent.

And changes will continue, changes will
Explore the possibilities that grow,
And over time each space will find its fill
Of every difference we could ever know.

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Wallace Stevens and Imagination

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Communism, Conservatism, Creative Writing, History, Imagination, John William Corrington, Literary Theory & Criticism, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Santayana, Wallace Stevens, Western Civilization, Writing on May 4, 2011 at 10:54 pm

Allen Mendenhall

This post first appeared here at themendenhall.

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It would seem at first blush that American modernism is incompatible with American conservatism.  But this impression pivots on a too-narrow conception of both “modernism” and “conservatism.”  The aesthetes who animated modern American poetry were, many of them, social and political conservatives.  This fact has been lost on those intellectuals who do not admit or acknowledge alternative and complicating visions of the world in general and of modernism in particular.  In the wake of the radical 1960s, many intellectuals simply ignored the contributions of the conservative imagination to literature, preferring to will away such unpalatable phenomena by pretending they do not exist.  However well-meaning, these intellectuals either assume without much hesitation or qualification that all modernist theories and practices were progressive, or they brush under the rug any conservative tendencies among writers they admire.  American modernism was progressive in its adaptation of forms, but it does not follow that avant-garde aesthetics necessarily entails progressive political programs.  Nevertheless, under Frankfurt School and Marxist auspices, among other things, the literati and others in the academy have rewritten the history and thought of modernist American poetry to purge it of all conservative influence.  George Santayana, Allen Tate, T.S. Eliot, Yvor Winters, Marianne Moore—these individuals, according to progressive mantras, were intellectually challenging and therefore, the argument goes, politically leftist.  Such revisionism will not do. Read the rest of this entry »

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Outline and Summary of Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law: 1619-1860 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, History, Jurisprudence, Law, Laws of Slavery, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Slavery, Western Civilization on April 20, 2011 at 4:23 pm

Allen Mendenhall

Introduction

The introduction serves as a brief historiographical essay that situates Morris’s text alongside other prominent texts and authors in the field.  Morris uses the introduction to familiarize readers with, among other things, the differences between common law and courts of equity, the differences between civil and criminal law, and other relevant information such as the fact that statutes in England and America are mostly products of the nineteenth century.  Morris believes that slavery reinforced English racism in that the English were predisposed to view Africans as inferior and so used the law to categorize racial difference and justify slave property.  Morris suggests that experts can skip most of his introduction probably because the introduction is, as I have suggested, a piece about historiography rather than a history in itself. 

PART ONE

Sources: Racial and Legal

Chapter One: The Function of Race in Southern Slave Law

Popular science maintained that blacks were inferior, and this understanding was reflected in law.  Indians were not enslaved as often or in the same numbers as blacks.  The presumptions and definitions of “slave” had to do with blackness; therefore, the legal status of mulattoes was often in flux.  Law had to define people by race and then determine their free or slave status afterwards.  Several Southern states adopted laws allowing free blacks to sell themselves as slaves.

Chapter Two: The Sources of Southern Slave Law

Some Southern slave law derived from Roman law; some derived from English common law.  The origins of Southern slave law are traceable to at least Virginia.  The degree to which Virginia followed or revised the common law is debatable.  In early Virginia, many blacks were treated as indentured servants, not slaves.  Not until the mid-seventeenth century did blacks become routinely associated with slavery.  There is little evidence to suggest that Virginians had a sophisticated understanding of ancient Roman or other European legal traditions.  A child’s status as free or slave followed the mother under the judicial principle of partus sequitur ventrem.  The traditional common law rule was that the child’s status followed the father.  Some appellate courts tried to link their opinions to the precedents of civil law or the Roman law on slavery.  Some judges analogized slavery to English villenage.  The roots of slavery in Hebraic tradition and Biblical literature had an enormous influence among nineteenth-century Southern whites. Read the rest of this entry »

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Law and the Ordinary, by Alexandre Lefebvre

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Jurisprudence, Law-and-Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, News and Current Events, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Writing on April 13, 2011 at 10:32 pm

Allen Mendenhall

One of my favorite journals, Telos, has published an essay that might interest readers of this site.  The essay, by Alexandre Lefebvre, is titled “Law and the Ordinary: Hart, Wittgenstein, Jurisprudence.”  Here is the abstract:

This essay argues that H. L. A. Hart’s concept of jurisprudence in the first chapter of The Concept of Law is strongly influenced by the relationship that Wittgenstein establishes between ordinary and metaphysical language. The article is divided into three sections. The first section shows how jurisprudence emerges as a denial of ordinary language in its pursuit of a definition of law. The second section traces Hart’s use of ordinary language to identify idleness or emptiness in jurisprudence. The third section presents Hart’s conception of his work as therapeutic in its attempt to lead jurisprudence back to the everyday.

Telos is one of the few literary-theoretical journals that regularly challenges the critical and political orthodoxy that pits itself, ironically, as the unorthodox, progressive, or transgressive.

Indeed, Telos seriously considers repressed, unpopular, and unapproved thoughts and theories. It complicates “conservative” and “liberal” as meaningful categories of discourse.

Having published such controversial authors as Paul Gottfried, Clyde Wilson, Alain de Benoist and others who situate themselves on the right-wing of the political spectrum, Telos is committed to contemplation and speculation, to profound and difficult ideas and not fashionable or typical recitations of mainstream opinions.

The journal has a long history of interrogating and revising critical theory and critiquing culture and society, and it continues to publish notable scholarship in traditions both left and right, although the signifiers left and right are not useful starting points from which to analyze anything that appears in this journal.

Paul Piconne was the founder and long-term editor of Telos.  Piconne died in 2004.  Today the editor is Russell A. Berman.  The only publication as daring and interesting as Telos is Counterpunch, a political newsletter and not an academic journal.  I urge readers of this site to read both Telos and Counterpunch as often and as closely as possible.

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Outline and Summary of Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1999)

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, History, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Rhetoric, Slavery on April 9, 2011 at 4:01 pm

Allen Mendenhall

Introduction

The focus of this book is on nineteenth-century New Orleans and the slave market that emerged then and there.  More than other workings of slavery, slave markets reduced humans to commodities with prices.  In particular, this book is interested in the story of slave showrooms, which held up to 100 slaves and where appraisals, accountings, back-room dealings, and other activities took place.  The book attributes the slave trade to mercantilism whereby colonial imports serviced and stocked metropolitan centers and generated profits secured for both state-sponsored companies and the monopoly-granting state itself.  Companies with well-connected leaders and government ties could gain state privileges and favors and receive special monopoly licenses to dominate trade, first in goods such as tobacco, indigo, rice, cotton, coffee, and so on, and later in human beings.  The ban of the international slave trade in 1808 did not lead to the reduction or softening of slavery, but rather to new shapes and manifestations of slavery, especially as slave populations moved increasingly from the upper to the lower South.  The ban led, more importantly for the purposes of this book, to the domestic slave trade.  The domestic slave trade intensified during the rise of the cotton kingdom.  The price of slaves changed with the price of cotton until the 1850s.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Law Professors and Laws of Slavery

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, History, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Slavery, The Literary Table, Western Civilization on April 4, 2011 at 3:44 pm

Allen Mendenhall

This post was first published over at The Literary Table.  I have reposted here because the content of the post relates to many recent posts on this site.

Kenneth Stamp published his landmark study The Peculiar Institution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf) in 1956, thus inaugurating the institutionalized and concerted efforts of scholars to examine the history of slavery in America with greater detail.  Research and study of the history of slavery then gained momentum in the 1960s.  One of the seminal texts from this period was David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Cornell University Press, 1966), winner of the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.  An ambitious undertaking, this book seeks to demonstrate the continuity of slavery through various times and places in Western Civilization.  A legitimizing narrative or logic always accompanies the institution of slavery, Davis suggests, but such narrative or logic—or narrative logic—is fraught with paradoxes threatening to undermine the institution altogether.  How, for instance, does one reconcile the ideals of freedom and equality, so celebrated by American Revolutionaries, with the pervasive reality of human bondage?  How does one make sense of a Christianity that both condemns and justifies slavery?  How can slaves be humans—rational agents with free will—and chattel property at once?  How does ending the slave trade worsen conditions for the enslaved?  If enslaving infidels, and only infidels, is valid by law and church teaching, then how do European colonists validate the enslavement of converted Africans?  How can colonists rely heavily upon an institution that they fear?  How can one of the earliest American colonies to oppose slavery (Georgia) become a hotbed for slavery?  If, according to law and church teaching, only pagans can be enslaved, why are not Natives enslaved as frequently or as much as Africans?  For that matter, why do early objections to slavery focus on Natives, who are less likely to become slaves than blacks?  Why do colonists insist on Christianizing slaves yet fear converted slaves?  How does the antislavery movement develop out of the very ideology sustaining slavery?  How do notions of sin both justify and subvert the institution of slavery?  Why does the Age of Enlightenment, with its celebration of reason, humanism, and liberation, intensify rather than disparage slavery?  And how can the New World, a putatively progressive landscape, rely on and perpetuate an ancient institution?  These and other questions permeate Davis’s provocative text.  Davis does not try to resolve these apparent contradictions so much as he explores them through various persons, places, and patterns; in so doing, he describes how human bondage gets revised and extended from one age to the next, and how justifications for slavery in one era inaugurate justifications for slavery in later eras.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Law & Literature: A Basic Bibliography

In American History, Arts & Letters, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Literary Theory & Criticism, Nineteenth-Century America, Novels, Pedagogy, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Semiotics, Slavery, The Literary Table, The Supreme Court, Western Civilization on April 2, 2011 at 9:16 pm

Patrick S. O’Donnell compiled this bibliography in 2010.  He teaches philosophy at Santa Barbara City College in California.  This bibliography first appeared over at The Literary Table. 

Amsterdam, Anthony G. and Jerome Bruner. Minding the Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Atkinson, Logan and Diana Majury, eds. Law, Mystery, and the Humanities: Collected Essays. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Ball, Milner S. The Word and the Law. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Bergman, Paul and Michael Asimow. Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the Movies.  Kansas  City, MO: Andrew McMeels Publ., revised ed., 2006.

Best, Stephen M. The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Binder, Guyora and Robert Weisburg. Literary Criticisms of Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Biressi, Anita. Crime, Fear and the Law in True Crime Stories. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Black, David A. Law in Film: Resonance and Representation. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Brooks, Peter. Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. Chicago, IL: University of  Chicago Press, 2001.

Brooks, Peter and Paul Gewirtz, eds. Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998 ed. Read the rest of this entry »

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Outline and Summary of Diana Ramey Berry’s Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007)

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Georgia, Nineteenth-Century America, Slavery on March 28, 2011 at 8:17 am

Allen Mendenhall

Book Theses

Quotation: “Swing the Sickle seeks to break down binary opposites such as house labor equals skilled work and field labor equals unskilled work to explore more subtle dynamics that involve skill, talent, seniority, experience, personal relationships, and circumstance.  Building on recent scholarship on various aspects of slave labor from organizational structures to occupational hierarchies, this book examines the intricacies of enslaved labor, family, community, and economy.” (2)

Quotation: “Swing the Sickle explores the ways different crops created a social hierarchy among the enslaved and the effect of such power dynamics within the quarters.” (3)

Introduction

Southern planters generally divided labor by skill, not by sex.  Specialized labor crossed gender lines.  This book explores this fact while paying attention to the quotidian operations of enslaved persons and slaveholders in Georgia.  What constituted skilled labor differed from plantation to plantation and crop to crop.  Labor itself defined slave life and community.  For that reason, the author uses the term “working social” to refer to “public work environments where bondpeople labored to complete a task and used the balance of the evening for socializing” (3).  Examining working socials gives us insights into the private lives of slaves.  Slavery was not just about producing for masters; it was also a way of life.  Although labor was always connected to the public world of commerce, agriculture, and politics, it was first a private, family, familial, and familiar institution in which slaves were subject to exploitation.  This book focuses on two regions of Georgia: the upcountry and piedmont county of Wilkes, and the lowcountry and tidewater county of Glynn.  These counties are representative of the general development of open and closed systems of slavery.  Glynn County was marked by large plantation settings, and Wilkes County by farms and smaller slave-holding units. 

Quotation: “[S]tudying gender allows us to identify the numerous ways bondspeople experienced slavery in addition to regional variance. […] We cannot understand slavery until we know more about the work that men and women performed.” (8)       Read the rest of this entry »

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Joyce Corrington Publishes Fear of Dying

In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Creative Writing, John William Corrington, Literary Theory & Criticism, Novels, Writing on March 20, 2011 at 2:03 pm

Allen Mendenhall

The late John William Corrington, known to friends and family as Bill, was a novelist, poet, attorney, screenwriter, essayist, and philosopher.  He authored several books of varying genres.  Click here to read my profile of Bill in The Front Porch Republic.     

Bill and his wife Joyce Corrington, a scientist, wrote a series of novels together, including So Small a Carnival (1986), A Project Named Desire (1987), A Civil Death (1987), and The White Zone (1990).  After Bill’s death, Joyce wrote a fifth novel that was never published—until now.  This fifth novel, Fear of Dying, has been published as a Kindle ebook and is available here.

Joyce Corrington is a kind and generous woman who has helped me in many different ways over the last few years.  Please buy this book and, if you like it, review it for the Kindle site.

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Cantor on Greenblatt and Shakespeare

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, News and Current Events, Shakespeare on March 13, 2011 at 1:38 pm

Allen Mendenhall

Paul Cantor’s review of Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare’s Freedom appears in this month’s issue of The American Conservative.  Greenblatt’s about-face means that my paper “Shakespeare’s Place in Law & Literature” will be dated upon publication, but that’s okay, because the trend of liberty is more important to me (and to society) than the timeliness of my research.