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  • The Trials of Law and Literature
  • Jennifer Travis (bio)

Will the wounds of the law and literature movement commit interdisciplinary scholarship to certain death? The question might seem unduly alarmist given the scope of Americanists’ work of late, but it is a question that Julie Stone Peters in PMLA’s “State of the Profession” encourages scholars to ask, and it is a question meant to provoke examination of the political and psychosocial investments in interdisciplinary work. Peters plumbs the mind of the law and literature movement and finds it sheltering a “secret interior wound” (448); far from clandestine, however, in the story she tells, the law and literature alliance plots its academic claims with near criminal intent. Literary scholars, lamenting the insignificance of their own fields of study, look to law as an “an exceptional intersection of textuality and social power” (446). Legal scholars, hurrying to humanize law, embrace literature as a challenge to “originalist and textualist theories of interpretation” (448). Each offers what the other lacks: literature, “its inability to achieve some ever-imagined but ever-receding praxis; law [its] wounded sense of estrangement from a kind of critical humanism that might stand up to the bureaucratic state apparatus” (448). Sadly, neither discipline can ever achieve its aim; the “splitting and transfer of disciplinary desire” (449), Peters’s argues, reproduces the very separate spheres that it claims to unravel. Each discipline becomes a caricature of itself with literature the humane friend to law’s “utilitarian calculus”; ultimately, for Peters, this imperfect union of compensatory desires invites us to question the logical possibility of interdisciplinary work itself (449).

Peters’s lament is only one of the more recent metacommentaries on the state of legal and literary studies, which endlessly delights in narratives of its development and, alas, dissolution.1 [End Page 345] It is not that these trajectories lack substance, although it may be that the “movement” is guilty less of the crime of misrecognition and more of mere figurative overuse, quite literally lured by alliteration. We speak, for example, of law and literature, law in literature (the examination of legal themes and tropes in literary works), law as literature (the use of literary techniques for legal interpretation), yet we praise scholarship that exceeds these overdetermined classifications and insist that neat compartmentalization is precisely what the best scholarship aims to upend.2 Even Peters finds promise in a project description that drops its literary lexicon in favor of terms like “culture” or the “humanities,” citing the scholarly organization, “Law, Culture, and the Humanities” as an example of a post-interdisciplinary formation (451). Of course, ceding law a privileged place in this rubric is hardly an erasure. In addition to the question of whether shifts in taxonomy will transform scholarship, perhaps scholars also should ask whether such changes will challenge an institutional culture that promotes endless competition for prestige and resources and often links its rewards to the demand that literary scholars make it “real.”

Fortunately, the books discussed here are less concerned about labels and more interested in evidence about the roles of literary and legal narratives in US history. To rephrase Gregg D. Crane, this is scholarship that substitutes “speculation” about the relationship of law and literature with historical evidence that such a relationship did exist (Race 10). Far from yoking law and literature together with violence, US literary scholars have demonstrated time and again the historical inseparability of legal and literary thought. Robert A. Ferguson, in his seminal study which helped to usher in the law and literature (law in literature) movement, Law and Letters in American Culture (1984), begins the first chapter of his book with the observation, borrowed from Thomas Paine, that “in America the Law is King” (11). While this has become, to some extent, a truism—Charles H. Adams in his study of James Fenimore Cooper calls the law a “‘parent’ for the Republic”—these same lawyers were also men of letters; the intellectual contexts of legal practice were intimately aligned with literary developments (Adams 10). We might think of Hannah Webster Foster who titled her eighteenth-century epistolary novel “history,” or mid-nineteenth-century authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass...

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