Adversaria: Literature and Law Mosaic ed. by Trevor Anderson, Anne McGillivray (review)

164 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 catastrophe graph'" and that his diagrams 'are not intended, of course, to be taken as literal topographies, but can function as a kind of shortcut for the representation of complex relationships like the ones I have been describing.' It is baffling why Smith would employ such a 'shortcut' which undermines The Locus ofMeaning's central thesis: that topographical representations are crucial to understanding complex literary relationships . Finally, in several places Smith makes claims for his 'isomorphisms' that greatly exceed the content of his readings. For example, he claims that his 'three topographies,' established in his reading of the assembly instructions , 'make the Derridean differance a lot more comprehensible for even the most confused student of deconstruction' because 'differance does more than simply differ and defer, as non-isomorphic definitions suggest; it literally adds a new dimension' which contains 'both positive and negative potentials.' I would suggest that this completely misreads differance because Smith makes no reference to Derrida's elaborately detailed discussion of the relationship between speech and writing, or to the metaphysics of 'writing' itself. In fact, after making this ambitious statement about hyperdimensionality and differance, Smith veers away from the discussion and Derrida is barely mentioned throughout the rest of the book. Ultimately, The Locus of Meaning fails to overcome the methodological problem of justifying how 'creating spatial isomorphisms' can become, as Smith claims, 'exciting and revealing.' The reader is continually forced to ask: what do graphs and diagrams reveal about the literary text? Although The Locus of Meaning is an intelligently written book and makes many perceptive observations about the fictional works studied, it does not provide any compelling reason why 'hyperdimensionality' is any more accurate or revealing than the word 'ambiguity' which it often seems to replace. The readings of the fictional works tend to follow a pattern wherein short histories of various critical approaches build towards a problem of interpretation which is 'solved' by the rubric of hyperdimensionality. For example, in comparing A Connecticut Yankee to Arthur Gordon Pym, Smith writes, 'Unlike Pym its hyperdimensional shift is not to the world of aesthetic forms but from aesthetic to political forms.' However, Smith has not proven why we must think of this 'shift' as 'hyperdimensional,' since his aesthetic and political analysis does not rely on chaos theory or lab tests on sheep in order to be understood. (EDWARD PARKINSON) Trevor Anderson and Anne McGillivray, editors. Adversaria: Literature and Law Mosaic 27:4 (December 1994). University of Manitoba. $20.00 paper This special edition of Mosaic is devoted to law and literature. As the journal is dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of literature, this edition HUMANITIES 165 is presumably intended for a readership with that background, but without specialist knowledge either of law or of the internal debates in the field of law and literature itself. In these terms, the work is largely successful. Specialist jargon is kept to a minimum, and with few exceptions , the contributions are both intelligent and accessible. The papers are almost universally studies of specific texts, rather than statements of grand theory. With this caveat, they represent a good crosssection of approaches. They divide roughly equally between accounts of internalist legal texts and of law as portrayed elsewhere, the old law as literature versus the law in literature distinction. At the same time, some of the papers show the frailty of that distinction. Thus Paul Vanderham's paper on the American obscenity case concerning Ulysses compares the novel with its literary construction in the judgment; and Lawrence Douglas places the account of judging in Billy Budd in the context of the debate between judgment as reading versus judgment as exclusion, current in the debates of internalist legal texts. Methodologically, the papers are similarly varied. Stephen Cohen's new historicism yields a refreshing analysis of The Merchant of Venice as the confrontation of law and equity in the social instability of late-Elizabethan England; Mary Polito uses deconstructive techniques to examine two sixteenth-century legal texts. Here, as well as in papers by Betty Travitsky on a seventeenth-century filicide, Nancy Johnson on civil rights in the Jacobin novel, and Christine Krueger on indecent assault depositions, considerable attention...