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What They Left, Part Two

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Fiction, Humanities, Short Story, Writing on July 6, 2012 at 8:45 am

A.G. Harmon is a professor at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law.  He received his J.D. from The University of Tennessee, his M.A. from The University of New Hampshire, and his Ph.D. in English from The Catholic University of America.  A nominee for The Pushcart Prize in the essay, he was a 1998-1999 Richard Weaver Graduate Fellow and winner of the 1995 Glen Writers Fellowship.  He received the 1994 Milton Center Postgraduate Writing Fellowship and was a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2003. His novel A House All Stilled (The University of Tennessee Press, 2002) was awarded The Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel in 2002 and was nominated for the Virginia Literary Prize and the Pen-Hemingway Award. His novel Fortnight was the runner-up for The William Faulkner Prize for the Novel in 2007. His book on the law in Shakespeare, Eternal Bonds, True Contracts: Law and Nature in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, was published by State University of New York Press in 2004.

The following story first appeared in The Bellingham Review, Volume XXIX, no. 1, Issue 57 (2006) and is reprinted with express permission from the author.

…continued from part one….

“You sell car parts—and shit like that?” the policeman had asked. He leaned against the iron post that held up the front porch.

“That’s right.”

“You own that junk stand? Up there on the road?

He was fat and sweaty and smelled of green after-shave. He chewed stick after stick of gum. Another policeman, bony, with a mustache as thin as a boy’s, sat on the front step. He dug dog shit from the soles of his patent leather shoes with a piece of tree bark.

“I sell parts,” he had answered.

“Must be doing pretty good, if you’re this busy,” the fat one said.

“It’s never too good.”

“Well, must be. You were there instead of here.”

He unwrapped the foil from a white stick of gum—spearmint—and shoved it into his full mouth. “Why’d you leave him, in the state he was in?”

“I have to work.”

The fat man frowned, squinted. “He stays—stayed—here while you were at work?”

“Yes.”

“You couldn’t get nobody to stay with him? In the state he’s in?”

“No.”

The man popped his gum. “How long did he stay alone?”

“‘Til I got done.” Read the rest of this entry »

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What They Left, Part One

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Fiction, Humanities, Short Story, Writing on July 5, 2012 at 8:45 am

A.G. Harmon is a professor at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law.  He received his J.D. from The University of Tennessee, his M.A. from The University of New Hampshire, and his Ph.D. in English from The Catholic University of America.  A nominee for The Pushcart Prize in the essay, he was a 1998-1999 Richard Weaver Graduate Fellow and winner of the 1995 Glen Writers Fellowship.  He received the 1994 Milton Center Postgraduate Writing Fellowship and was a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2003. His novel A House All Stilled (The University of Tennessee Press, 2002) was awarded The Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel in 2002 and was nominated for the Virginia Literary Prize and the Pen-Hemingway Award. His novel Fortnight was the runner-up for The William Faulkner Prize for the Novel in 2007. His book on the law in Shakespeare, Eternal Bonds, True Contracts: Law and Nature in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, was published by State University of New York Press in 2004.

The following story first appeared in The Bellingham Review, Volume XXIX, no. 1, Issue 57 (2006) and is reprinted with express permission from the author. 

What They Left

Each call stood out from the next: a soft moan, a low horn, rising. The man’s head lifted an inch. His eyes wrinkled at the corners. His tongue touched the top of his palate, as if he smelled fire.

There was nothing to keep him from his work except these sounds, and even they only made him pause for a moment—turn small, keen eyes toward the line of hills, colored black in the last orange light, from which the sounds seemed to come. Then he returned to his labor.

A pen-light hung from the raised hood of the car’s engine, where his hands—the knuckles scabbed and some bleeding—toiled inside the motor. His flesh was raw and cracked and chapped from too much wind, too much weather without gloves, too little idleness.

He had lived past his middle age at the end of this tree-lined road. He had cut the way himself, a narrow alley leading from his back door, through the rear of his property, and ending at his store on the highway. There he sold old things, used things, gathered together by function, then by size, then by cost. Besides him, the only people that used the road were those who abandoned things alongside it. He did not know when it had become a castaway point, but it had happened slowly, and he had noticed it, slowly. After a time, as he made his way home, he began to find iceboxes, dishwashers, gates, air conditioners, lengths of fence, rolls of barbed wire. In the end, weeds took them.

Sometimes he would stop to see if he wanted any of the discarded things for himself—to salvage, reclaim, sell. If anything could be saved, he would slip back at night with a pulley and tackle, winch it against a tree, then slide what he wanted up from the ditch. Sometimes people got there before him though, so he had to work fast. Other times people took back what they had left. Once, at his store, a man claimed a tiller that had taken three days to fix:

“This is mine,” the man had said, his eyes bright, sharp. “I can tell.”

He shook his head, widened his stance so that his body stood at an angle to the other.

“I found it on the road.”

“It’s mine.”

“Not now.”

The other had placed his hand on the plastic grip, leaned over the top of the thing, glared: “You stole it. Prove you didn’t.”

So he had learned. He had to be careful of what he touched. He had to change things, just enough.

This time, though, they had worked too quickly, had been interrupted. He himself might have surprised them, coming down the road. He was thin, but tall, so his feet hit the earth hard and loud as he walked, grinding in the chert. They could have heard him a long way off. Nothing else accounted for how much they had left. The stereo had been slipped out, and some of the engine broken free, but he could work with what remained. It lay, piece by piece, cupped inside his hands; cold and slick and greasy; with his tools, it could be made to tick and turn warm.

It was only a day or so there; not even that. It had come to his notice that morning, as he walked to work. He might have overlooked it, had not the first of the sun picked out lights in the black paint. The car had been left off the shoulder, down a bank and beside a stand of pines.

His wrench slid over a bolt deep beneath the battery plate. It was a tight fit, but it caught the bolt’s angles. After several yanks, the wrench fell into the familiar release and give of loosening. If all went well, the engine would start soon, with new plugs and a new fan for the radiator. He would have to decide what to do with it then, though. The law would come into play. He could not say how, but he would have to decide.

His cap made his head hot. He pulled his hands out of the body and pushed his hat’s bill back from his brow. He thought for a moment and ran his fingers over whiskers, three days grown. He raked them back and forth. The bite warmed his face.

There was more to do, but not now. In the morning, then.

It was a small climb up from the stash of trees back to the road. He picked up a bucket of greasy tools, held the light between his teeth, and clawed at the grass with his free hand to keep his purchase. Once there, he took the light from his mouth and shined it in the direction he would take. The beam bobbed before him as he walked—a soft, collapsing tunnel through the dark. The tools jangled in the bucket.

The sounds returned: Two. Three. Silence.

He marched on through three more calls, and rests, and calls, before he stopped and spun toward them, swiveling on his down heel. He stared into the woods for a moment—a gray, ashen blue—then commenced to walk. He kept up the same stride as before, but with the hills facing.

There was no point going on until his mind was free. They might have come back—keys in hand. And he would not surrender his work to theirs. It was no more theirs than his.

He stopped to glance back at the car, then slowly ran his light down its length, fender to bumper, marking the body.

It was almost lost in the dark, now. It would take a man with a light, now.

To find the sounds he would have to crawl down the opposite bank, which fell off at a stiff grade. The light and the bucket together would be too much to carry. He would need a free hand to compensate, so he set the bucket down and drew out a hammer by its claw. He hefted it twice, then once more—once for each sound he had heard—and sat himself on the bank’s edge. He went belly first, sliding, the damp ground pressing through his clothes, kissing at his skin. Read the rest of this entry »

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Matthew Simmons Reviews J. Mark Hart’s “Fielder’s Choice”

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Fiction, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Novels, Southern Literary Review, Writing on June 26, 2012 at 8:00 am

Matthew Simmons was born and raised in Whiteville, North Carolina.  He lived in Raleigh for eight years, where he went to college at North Carolina State University, roasted coffee for a living, and developed a taste for single-malt Scotch.  Currently a Ph.D. student in English at the University of South Carolina, Matt lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where he tries to garden and regularly rides his bicycle in coat and tie.

The following review appeared here at the Southern Literary Review.

Years ago, after reading Richard Russo’s Mohawk, I decided I needed more flexibility in labeling fiction.  Obviously, there was pulp, there was genre fiction, and there was the rarified air of “lit-tra-ture.”  But what I’d found in Mohawk seemed to somehow occupy parts of all of those labels simultaneously and effortlessly.  I needed a name for this effortless occupation of different registers, and it came to me halfway through another, similar book.  What I was reading was, in fact, the Great American Middlebrow Novel.  Such is a book that tries to be more than an afternoon or a weekend’s entertainment; nevertheless, its writing is highly readable.  It does not set out to explore the eternal complexities of the human experience, but rather tries to show the suppleness and myriad realities that make up an individual or a group’s experience of a specific place, at a particular time.  That last bit is incredibly important.  The GAMN is a book of specificities, of particularities, and it plumbs these specificities and particularities to give us some access to the localized truths of a moment.  J. Mark Hart’s forthcoming debut novel, Fielder’s Choice, tries its damnedest to show itself as worthy of the title, and succeeds, with varying degrees of success, at achieving this goal.

Hart’s locale and moment are Birmingham, 1969.  Brad Williams, our narrator, wants to avoid the hellish fires of the steel mills.  But there is a fate worse than the mills also possibly awaiting him:  the jungles of Vietnam.  Working class, his only hopes at escape are for his athletic prowess on the baseball diamond to win him a college scholarship, as well as drawing a high draft number.  The first of these hopes is immediately compromised—a lifetime shortstop, senior year finds Brad moved over to second to accommodate Robbie, a black student transferred to West Lake High via integration, who is a superior shortstop to Brad in every way.

And thus are the specifics of Hart’s novel—a Birmingham trying to live down the specter of Bull Connor’s hoses and dogs, and a young man trying to find his place in this uncertain newness.  At its best, Fielder’s Choice does a truly wonderful job of presenting a city struggling to understand itself and an 18-year-old boy trying both to fit into this city and get out of it.  Hart’s presentation of Brad is, in many ways, wonderfully well-done.  Similarly, the city’s tensions are admirably sketched, and Birmingham, as a character itself, feels incredibly alive and compelling.  Hart’s debut novel thus promises to join the august company of the Great American Middlebrow novel, an achievement to be lauded—especially when the author, an attorney by day, is only moonlighting as a novelist.

Promising though it may be, Fielder’s Choice is also, at times, deeply problematic.  The prose can be clunky and wooden:  explaining his friend’s father’s drinking habits, Brad speaks of “[the father’s] customary can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, or, in his vernacular, a ‘PBR.’”  Contrast that passage with any number of gorgeous moments from Brad’s courtship of Susie and you’ll find yourself frustrated—Hart can, at times, be an immensely lyrical and even beautiful writer, and you’ll wish he always was.  But significantly more troubling than some hiccups with the prose is the novel’s reliance on flat, stereotypical characters.  Of course the hippie would be a Yankee, and of course he would drive a VW with a day-glo peace sign on the back window.  Of course the main antagonist would be named Bubba, and would be a violent, reactionary, bigoted redneck.  Robbie, the African-American shortstop who forces Brad to move positions, often seems like little more than a plot device and a means for developing Brad’s character—a shame and even an error, as Robbie begins as one of the most promising characters in the novel.

And while Paxton, the Yankee hippie, becomes more sympathetic as the novel progresses, it is not because his character deepens, but because Brad becomes more involved in the anti-war movement.  Meanwhile, the Bubbas of the novel are never any more than boogeymen, “hicks,” to use Brad’s distressingly frequent verbiage, who wave the Confederate flag and stand in the way of progress.  Near the novel’s end, Brad glowing speaks of Birmingham moving into the “New South,” and we understand that Brad understands Bubba and his ilk not so much as people as impediments to the birth of this “New South.”  Brad’s voice thus carries a nascent sense of cosmopolitan elitism.  And while I see this as a legitimate and even necessary act of characterization, I’m nevertheless troubled that Brad gets off scot-free in this regard.  The Bubbas of the novel, and of Southern history, are of course inexcusably wrong in their racial attitudes and certainly on the wrong side of history.  But this does not make them any less complexly human, something that Brad never recognizes, and something Hart never calls him to task for.  We cannot present a fully nuanced picture of the South at this time—which is, again, what I think Hart wants to do—if we merely write off the Bubbas of the world, wrong-headed and misguided as they may be, as merely villainous “hicks” resembling Snively Whiplash more than flawed human beings.

This not to denigrate how fine the novel is on the whole.  Brad himself is a deeply compelling and well-realized hero.  Susie, Brad’s love interest and female counterpart, helps to Hart’s exploration of 1969 Birmingham in sophisticated ways, and Susie and Brad’s relationship is at turns soaring, titillating, crushingly painful, and immensely familiar to us all.  Hart presents the changing relationships between Brad and his childhood best friend BJ, as well as between Brad and his father, powerfully and complexly.  Brad, and those characters closest to him, are wonderfully rendered, strongly presented, and, at times, heart-wrenchingly achieved.

This is all to say that Fielder’s Choice is a novel of real promise, despite some significant problems.  Mr. Hart has given us a very fine representation of a boy becoming a man in a place and time that are immensely complicated, and we are moved to joy and frustration alongside Brad.  It is a deeply enjoyable novel, one I found myself tearing through in three days—no short task for a nearly 500-page book.  And while it has its problems—the writing is sometimes too flat, the characters often too stock, the ending perhaps too neat—I am amazed, again, that this is a first novel by a man whose vocation is not fiction.  And while the problems may keep Mr. Hart’s first novel from being a Great American Middlebrow Novel, it comes mighty close.  Ultimately, Fielder’s Choice is a very good book about a very complex time.  I’m a fan.

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Review of Coleman Hutchinson’s Apples and Ashes

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Fiction, Historicism, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Novels, Southern History, Southern Literary Review on June 20, 2012 at 8:00 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following review first appeared here at the Southern Literary Review.

Confederate literature and literary culture have not received the critical consideration that they warrant.  Not only that, but they have been dismissed as scant and mediocre.  Scholars of the South and of the Civil War—even those whose work has reached wide audiences—have paid more attention to other humanistic fields than to literature, particularly to Confederate literature and particularly during the so-called “fighting” years of 1861-1865.  This neglect, argues Coleman Hutchison in Apples and Ashes, is regrettable because “the Confederacy gave rise to a robust literary culture.”

Several factors account for the dearth of scholarship on Confederate literature, not least of which is the fact that the Confederacy existed for only a short time, during which Confederate writers had to overcome, among other things, ink and paper shortages; many of these men and women struggled to see their work reach print in cities occupied by Union troops.  Accordingly, much of what might have become Confederate literature was lost or unpublished, yet the relative shortage of Confederate literature was not due to lack of talent, but to printing paralysis.

Another reason Confederate literature has failed to become a common subject of study is the presumption that this topic is not worthwhile, largely because Confederate cultural values have been discredited.  There is, today, the tendency to demonize or denounce any person who would take seriously the claims and writings of Confederate partisans, politicians, and highbrows.  Yet to take something seriously is not to endorse it, and to proclaim certain intellectual matters off-limits—even if those matters are highly complex and, when studied carefully, telling about contingencies and urgencies of our own day—is dangerous and foolish indeed.  Hutchison is just as aware of the importance of Confederate literature as he is of the importance of disclaiming it.  “To write about the Confederate nation,” he says, “is to risk being seen as endorsing its right to exist.”  He adds, emphatically, that his book “is by no means an apology for the Confederacy or Confederate nationalism,” and that he “finds almost nothing that is admirable in the politics and culture of the Civil War South.”  That Hutchison feels compelled to disassociate himself from Confederate ideology at all suggests how strangely anxious the impulsive, opportunistic, or lazy readers will be to either condemn or celebrate (depending on their perspective) this book as pro-Confederate.

Mostly uninterested in matters of taste and judgment regarding the literary quality of his subjects, Hutchison submits that Confederate literature teaches literary scholars not only about the nuances and cultures of nationalism, but also about nineteenth century American (read: non-Confederate) letters generally, since Confederate literature was in conversation with—and in contradistinction to—American literary nationalism.  Among the distinguishing features of Confederate literature were its aspirational impulses and its focus upon an imagined and impossible future.  In some respects, the South’s belles lettres recognized the poignancy of a lost cause narrative before the cause was actually lost. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sidney Morgenbesser on the American Pragmatists

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Nineteenth-Century America, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on June 13, 2012 at 8:00 am

Sidney Morgenbesser was a philosophy professor at Columbia University.  Among his students were Jerry Fodor, Raymond Geuss, Robert Nozick, and Derek Parfit.  In the following videos, Professor Morgenbesser speaks to Bryan Magee about the American Pragmatists.

Section One

Section Two

Section Three

Section Four

Section Five

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Photography by Eleanor Leonne Bennett, Part Two

In Art, Arts & Letters, Creativity, Humanities, Photography on June 7, 2012 at 8:00 am

Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 16 year old internationally award winning  photographer and artist who has won first places with National  Geographic,The World Photography Organisation, Nature’s Best Photography, Papworth Trust, Mencap, The Woodland trust and Postal Heritage. Her photography has  been published in the Telegraph, The Guardian, BBC News Website and on the cover of books and magazines  in the United states and Canada. Her art is globally exhibited, having been shown in London, Paris, Indonesia, Los Angeles, Florida, Washington, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, Spain, Germany, Japan, Australia and The  Environmental Photographer of the year Exhibition (2011) among many other locations. She was also the only person from the UK  to have her work displayed in the National Geographic and Airbus See The Bigger Picture global exhibition tour with the United Nations International Year Of Biodiversity 2010.

 

 

 

 

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Photography by Eleanor Leonne Bennett, Part One

In Art, Arts & Letters, Humanities, Photography on June 6, 2012 at 8:00 am

Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 16 year old internationally award winning  photographer and artist who has won first places with National  Geographic,The World Photography Organisation, Nature’s Best Photography, Papworth Trust, Mencap, The Woodland trust and Postal Heritage. Her photography has  been published in the Telegraph, The Guardian, BBC News Website and on the cover of books and magazines  in the United states and Canada. Her art is globally exhibited, having been shown in London, Paris, Indonesia, Los Angeles, Florida, Washington, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, Spain, Germany, Japan, Australia and The  Environmental Photographer of the year Exhibition (2011) among many other locations. She was also the only person from the UK  to have her work displayed in the National Geographic and Airbus See The Bigger Picture global exhibition tour with the United Nations International Year Of Biodiversity 2010.

 

 

 

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“Fairy Tale Mail,” Poems by Margery Hauser

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Humanities, Law, Law-and-Literature, Poetry, Writing on May 29, 2012 at 8:59 am
Margery Hauser is  a New york City poet whose work has appeared in Poetica Magazine, Möbius, The Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, Umbrella and other journals, both print and online.  Excerpts from “Fairy Tale Mail” (which she published here at The Literary Lawyer) have appeared or will soon appear in Ides of March and The First Literary Review. When she is not writing poetry, she can often be found dancing, knitting,  practicing yoga or working out with her tai chi broadsword.  She is a member of the Parkside Poetry Collective, for whose encouragement and support she ever grateful.
 
 
 
Subject: Civil suit
 
We’ve read the facts pursuant to the case
regarding your late husband’s sad demise.
Regretfully, a lawsuit has no trace
of merit and therefore we do advise
that evidence a-plenty proves his fall
occurred while in commission of a crime.
No fault accrues to Pig and Pig, et al.
No damages are due you at this time.
        His huffing and his puffing further show
        a pre-existing illness and although
        this wasn’t cause of death it surely must
        support that bringing suit would be unjust. 
        Your husband died attempting a break-in
         and so this suit is one you cannot win.
 
 
 
To: NRimer@mere_l’oye.net
Subject: Pumpkineater v. Pumpkineater
 
My client in an affidavit swears
that he confined his faithless wife because
she had indulged in numerous affairs –
he didn’t think he’d broken any laws.
Her infidelities made him so sad
and left him feeling helpless, in disgrace;
in fact, you might say that she drove him mad
by throwing her amours smack in his face.
These acts diminished his capacity
        to tell right from wrong. Her audacity
        impelled him to this deed.  He does regret
        his rashness and hopes she can just forget,
        forgive and drop the charges that she brought.
        He simply was distressed and overwrought.
 
 
 
Subject: re: Pumpkineater v. Pumpkineater
From: NRimer@mere_l’oye.net
 
Mrs. Pumpkineater’s life was hell
when Peter, in a fit of jealous rage,
confined her in a fetid pumpkin shell
no better than a jail cell or a cage.
She swears that she was faithful, always true
and kept her marriage vows although her mate
treated her most harshly in our view.
He threatened violence if she came home late.
        She’s willing to drop charges and agree
        to just divorce the beast, let him go free.
        She wishes he would suffer as she did
        but asks for nothing more than to be rid
        of this abusive, cruel and jealous spouse.
        Oh, by the way, she wants the car and house.
 
 
 
Subject: State v. Farmer’s Wife
 
Regarding claims by Mouse and Mouse and Mouse:
details of their de-tailing do support
the charge against the farmer’s vicious spouse.
We demand this case be tried in court.
The victims all are visually impaired
and wandered by pure chance across her path.
Under oath they all have so declared, 
but she responded with unbridled wrath!
        It’s clear she meant to take each Mouse’s life,
        her WMD a carving knife.
        We know that rodents often are maligned.
        We know society neglects the blind. 
        The only way the Mice will be requited
        is if their assailant is indicted.
 
 
 
Subject: Name Change
 
The miller’s daughter to my great surprise
has ruined my business plan – a sort of game
that asked contestants to vie for a prize
by guessing my most strange and secret name.
How that was managed she would never tell –
it’s not as if I bandied it about.
But she’s the queen and my plan’s shot to hell.
It looks as if my luck has just run out.
        I had ideas – big ones – they’re all a bust.
        She found me out so I must now adjust.
        I’ve given it much thought and I’ve assessed
        the possibilities that won’t be guessed. 
        Please amend the records; let them show
        that my last name is Stiltskin, first name Joe.

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Lack of Intellectual Preparation?

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Historicism, History, Humanities, Law on May 25, 2012 at 9:03 am

Allen Mendenhall

Last week I was reading several old reviews of Lawrence Friedman’s landmark work, A History of American Law.  I came across a 1974 review by David J. Rothman in Reviews in American History.  Rothman made the following point, which, despite being made 34 years ago, is bound to offend some readers of this site, especially those who are lawyers or law professors:

I have attended conferences of law professors doggedly determined to be interdisciplinary, and I have been appalled at the lack of intellectual preparation that many of them had for such work. They would talk blithely about bringing the insights of, say, game theory to the law-with only the vaguest idea of what game theory was all about. (Indeed, how could they have had more than a vague idea? After a general undergraduate training, they went to the law schools, then to the courts as clerks, then back to the law schools.) So one must, perforce, have a lurking fear that some of the new interdisciplinary efforts will be so inadequate as to prompt law professors to decide to do well what they can do, rather than to do badly what they should do. And law schools may well continue to perpetuate half-knowledge. They remain torn between serving as trade schools to the profession and graduate schools to the scholars. This compromise may turn out to be less and less tenable over the next years.
 
Does Rothman’s claim remain true when the “new interdisciplinary efforts” aren’t so new anymore?  Today many law professors hold Ph.D.s in various disciplines, and these professors use their unique, specialized training to enhance legal scholarship in their respective sub-disciplines.  But does “extra” graduate work or a specialized degree necessarily signal a superior skill set, or is Rothman’s view elitist?   These questions will be the subject of a future post on this site, and potentially of a future article, so I would like to hear back from readers.  Please email your responses to me or, if you’d prefer, post them in the comment box below.    

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Liberty and Shakespeare, Part Two

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Economics, History, Humanities, Law, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Shakespeare, Western Civilization on May 22, 2012 at 8:08 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following essay orginally appeared here at Mises Daily.

The Later Works (1973 to present)

It is well settled that James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination (1973)[29] catalyzed the law-and-literature movement as we know it today. A professor in the Department of English, Department of Classics, and College of Law at the University of Michigan, White brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective to bear on this field that he more or less founded. He remains prolific even in his old age, having published a string of books on a wide variety of topics having to do with legal rhetoric and legal or literary hermeneutics. Since White’s landmark tour de force in 1973, several legal scholars have followed in his footsteps, venturing into literature (broadly defined to include novels, plays, poems, short stories, essays, and so on) to make sense of legal culture and legal texts. Some of the resulting scholarship has been quite good — some, however, more than slightly wanting.

Shortly after White’s “overture,” the work of literary PhDs like Robert Weisberg (PhD, English, 1971, Harvard University; JD, 1979, Stanford University), Richard H. Weisberg (PhD, French and comparative literature, 1970, Cornell University; JD, 1974, Columbia University), and, among others, Stanley Fish (PhD, English, 1962, Yale University) lent credibility to a field seen as dubious by law-school deans and territorial literature professors.[30] Today the movement seems to be picking up, not losing, momentum, in part due to the interdisciplinary nature of the project and in part due to the literati heavyweights who have used the movement as an opportunity to enlarge their celebrity status (to say nothing of their salaries).

The vast array of Shakespeare-focused works that flew under the banner of law and literature during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s actually undermined the entire field. Titles like Michael Richmond’s “Can Shakespeare Make You a Partner?” (1989)[31] signaled a practical but nonscholastic rationale for lawyers to turn to Shakespeare’s texts. Works most commonly addressed during this period include The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Hamlet, and Measure for Measure.[32] In the rush to canonize Shakespeare in this budding genre that sought to include humanities texts in professional schools, even the conspiracy theories of a Supreme Court justice, John Paul Stevens, became authoritative readings.[33] Stevens is not the only Supreme Court justice with an opinion on the Shakespeare authorship debate, as the following chart by the Wall Street Journal[34] makes clear:

Shakespeare’s Court
The Supreme Court on the likely author of Shakespeare’s plays:
Active Justices
Roberts, Chief Justice No comment.
Stevens Oxford
Scalia Oxford
Kennedy Stratford
Souter “No idea.”
Thomas No comment.
Ginsburg “No informed views.”*
Breyer Stratford
Alito No comment.

*Justice Ginsburg suggests research into alternate candidate, Florio.
Retired Justices
O’Connor Not Stratford
Blackmun* Oxford
Brennan* Stratford

*Deceased

That Supreme Court justices have weighed in on Shakespeare’s authorship is more a study in itself and less a constructive contribution to Shakespeare scholarship. Not long after Stevens’s law-review article, at any rate, some creative attempts to render the Shakespeare as lawyer or other conspiracy theories surfaced. Law professor James Boyle, for instance, penned a novel, The Shakespeare Chronicles (2006),[35] dealing with the obsessive search for the “true” author of Shakespeare’s works. I suspect that Boyle would admit that The Shakespeare Chronicles, being fiction, does not represent scholarship, even if its production required rigorous scholarly research. Read the rest of this entry »