Cannons and Codes by LaCroix, Alison L.; Masur, Jonathan S.; Nussbaum, Martha C.;

Law, Literature, and America's Wars

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Product details:

Publisher OUP USA
Date of Publication 4 August 2021

ISBN 9780197509371
Binding Hardback
No. of pages344 pages
Size 163x236x30 mm
Weight 635 g
Language English

Short description:

This edited volume on war in law and literature addresses the many ways in which war affects human society and the many groups of people whose lives are affected by war. The essays, by preeminent scholars, discuss the ways in which literary works can shed light on legal thinking about war, and how a deep understanding of law can lead to interpretive insights on literary works. Some concern the lives of soldiers; others focus on civilians living in war zones, who are caught up in the conflict; still others address themselves to the home front, far from the theatre of war. By collecting such diverse perspectives, with contributions from preeminent scholars of philosophy, literature, and law, this volume aims to show how literature has reflected the totalizing nature of war and the ways in which it distorts law across domains.

Long description:

It can be said that western literature begins with a war story, the Iliad; and that this is true too of many non-Western literary traditions, such as the Mahabharata. And yet, though a profoundly human subject, war often appears to be by definition outside the realm of structures such as law and literature. When we speak of war, we often understand it as incapable of being rendered into rules or words. Lawyers struggle to fit the horrors of the battlefield, the torture chamber, or the makeshift hospital filled with wounded and dying civilians into the framework of legible rules and shared understandings that law assumes and demands. In the West's centuries-long effort to construct a formal law of war, the imperative has been to acknowledge the inhumanity of war while resisting the conclusion that it need therefore be without law. Writers, in contrast, seek to find the human within war--an individual story, perhaps even a moment of comprehension. Law and literature might in this way be said to share imperialist tendencies where war is concerned: toward extending their dominion to contain what might be uncontainable.

Law, literature, and war are thus all profoundly connected--and it is this connection this edited volume aims to explore, assembling essays by preeminent scholars to discuss the ways in which literary works can shed light on legal thinking about war, and how a deep understanding of law can lead to interpretive insights on literary works. Some of the contributions concern the lives of soldiers; others focus on civilians living in war zones who are caught up in the conflict; still others address themselves to the home front, far from the theatre of war. By collecting such diverse perspectives, the volume aims to illuminate how literature has reflected the totalizing nature of war and the ways in which it distorts law across domains.

It is a volume that initially gives the impression of intervening in the center of a very specific, even somewhat obscure, Venn diagram: law, literature, and war. That nexus, however, proves to be surprisingly capacious, wide-ranging, and fluid, unsettling the terms that structure the diagram in the first place.

Introduction, Alison L. LaCroix, Jonathan S. Masur, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Laura Weinrib
Chapter 1: Law, Literature, and War: A Plenary Panelm with Justice, Stephen G. Breyer, Judge Diane P. Wood, Paul Woodruff, and Martha C. Nussbaum
PART I: FORMING A NATION THROUGH WAR'S CRUCIBLE
Chapter 2: Law and War in the New World: The Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, and The Pioneers, Douglas Baird
Chapter 3: New Light on the Trial of Billy Budd, Richard H. McAdams and Jacob I. Corré
Chapter 4: Two Humanitarianisms in Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," John Fabian Witt
Chapter 5: Law and its Limits in Albion Tourgée's Bricks without Straw, Kate Masur
PART II: THE TWO GREAT WARS
Chapter 6: Trenches, Cadences, and Faces: Social Connection and Emotional Expression in the Great War, Nancy Sherman
Chapter 7: Crucified by the War Machine: Britten's War Requiem and the Hope of Postwar Resurrection, Martha C. Nussbaum
Chapter 8: Undivided Loyalty: The Problem of Allegiance in the Literature of War, Alison L. LaCroix and William A. Birdthistle
Chapter 9: Law and Legitimacy in A Farewell to Arms, Laura Weinrib
Chapter 10: Lawmaking, Bilateral Rules, and a Debunking of Catch-22, Saul Levmore
Chapter 11: Catch-22 and the Law of Large Organizations, Jonathan S. Masur
PART III: AFTERWARD
Chapter 12: Sympathizing with Both Sides: Racism and American Intervention in Vietnam, Paul Woodruff
Chapter 13: Paul Beatty, the Rhetoric of War, and the Selling Out of Civil Rights, Elizabeth Anker
Chapter 14: How War Makes (and Unmakes) the Democratic State: Reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West In A Populism Age, Aziz Z. Huq
Chapter 15: Black Radicalism, Autobiography, and Prisoners of War, Tommie Shelby