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"Language shapes and reflects how we think about the world. It engages and intrigues us. Our everyday use of language is quite effortless--we are all experts on our native tongues. Despite this, issues of language and meaning have long flummoxed the judges on whom we depend for the interpretation of our most fundamental legal texts. Should a judge feel confident in defining common words in the texts without the aid of a linguist? How is the meaning communicated by the text determined? Should the communicative meaning of texts be decisive, or at least influential? ... [Contributors] argue that the meaning of language is crucial to the interpretation of legal texts, such as statutes, constitutions, and contracts. Accordingly ... analysis of language from linguists, philosophers, and legal scholars should influence how courts interpret legal texts."--
Contemporary legal reasoning has more in common with fictional discourse than we tend to realize. Through an examination of the U.S. Supreme Court’s written output during a recent landmark term, this book exposes many of the parallels between these two special kinds of language use. Focusing on linguistic and rhetorical patterns in the dozens of reasoned opinions issued by the Court between October 2014 and June 2015, the book takes nonlawyer readers on a lively tour of contemporary American legal reasoning and acquaints legal readers with some surprising features of their own thinking and writing habits. It analyzes cases addressing a huge variety of issues, ranging from the rights of dri...
Tragedy is one of the oldest and most resilient forms of narrative. Considering texts from ancient Greece to the present day, this comprehensive introduction shows how tragedy has been re-imagined and redefined throughout Western cultural history. Tragedy offers a concise history of tragedy tracing its evolution through key plays, prose, poetry and philosophical dimensions. John Drakakis examines a wealth of popular plays, including works from the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Sarah Kane and Tom Stoppard. He also considers the rewriting and appropriating of ancient drama though a wide range of authors, such as Chaucer, George Eliot, Ted Hughes and Colm Tóibín. Drakakis also demystifies complex philosophical interpretations of tragedy, including those of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Benjamin. This accessible resource is an invaluable guide for anyone studying tragedy in literature or theatre studies.
Examines the culture of ghost-seeing, arguing that the ghost represents a symbol of the psychological hauntedness of modern experience.
We, the King challenges the dominant top-down interpretation of the Spanish Empire and its monarchs' decrees in the New World, revealing how ordinary subjects had much more say in government and law-making than previously acknowledged. During the viceregal period spanning the post-1492 conquest until 1598, the King signed more than 110,000 pages of decrees concerning state policies, minutiae, and everything in between. Through careful analysis of these decrees, Adrian Masters illustrates how law-making was aided and abetted by subjects from various backgrounds, including powerful court women, indigenous commoners, Afro-descendant raftsmen, secret saboteurs, pirates, sovereign Chiriguano Indians, and secretaries' wives. Subjects' innumerable petitions and labor prompted – and even phrased - a complex body of legislation and legal categories demonstrating the degree to which this empire was created from the “bottom up”. Innovative and unique, We, the King reimagines our understandings of kingship, imperial rule, colonialism, and the origins of racial categories.
This volume charts the rapid rise of various forms of diaspora institutions, across distinct historical phases and geographical regions, explaining the way that evolving models and best practices of international migration management have increasingly changed the way states see their diasporas and reconfigured the rules of international politics.
"From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect represents a sustained argument for the continued vitality of Law and Literature. It argues that the traditional methods of Law and Literature can be combined with work in critical media studies, affect theory, and cultural narratology to address topics such as ethnonationalism, anti-immigration sentiments, and systemic racism in nations like Germany and the United States. Taking stock of the pluralization and diversification of the field at fifty years from a comparative standpoint, the book understands Law and Literature as a political project. This has a precedence in inaugural Law and Literature texts like Jacob Grimm's Von der Poesie im Re...
Earl Warren and the Warren Court comprises essays written by leading experts from the fields of law, history, and social science on the most important areas of the Warren Court's contributions in American law. In addition, Scheiber includes appraisals of the Warren Court's influence abroad, written by authorities of legal development in Europe, Latin America, Canada, and East Asia. This book offers a unique set of analyses that portray how innovations in American law generated by the Warren Court led to a reconsideration of law and the judicial role--and in many areas of the world, to transformations in judicial procedure and the advancement of substantive human rights. Also explored within these pages are the personal role of Earl Warren in the shaping of "Warren era" law and the ways in which his character and background influenced his role as Chief Justice.
Ecocriticism explores the ways in which we imagine and portray the relationship between humans and the environment across many areas of cultural production, including Romantic poetry, wildlife documentaries, climate models, the Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, and novels by Margaret Atwood, Kim Scott, Barbara Kingsolver and Octavia Butler. Greg Garrard’s animated and accessible volume responds to the diversity of the field today and explores its key concepts, including: pollution pastoral wilderness apocalypse animals Indigeneity the Earth. Thoroughly revised to reflect the breadth and diversity of twenty-first-century environmental writing and criticism, this edition addresses climate change and justice throughout, and features a new chapter on Indigeneity. It also presents a glossary of terms and suggestions for further reading. Concise, clear and authoritative, Ecocriticism offers the ideal introduction to this crucial subject for students of literary and cultural studies.
This fascinating study explores the multifarious erotic themes associated with the magic lantern shows, which proved the dominant visual medium of the West for 350 years, and analyses how the shows influenced the portrayals of sexuality in major works of Gothic fiction.