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Zusatztext "We abide within a legal culture; the scene of our existence is formed by law. Yet much in our experience seems to elude accounting by law's processes and languages. With passion and erudition, in readings as agile as they are original, Ravit Reichman reveals how a sense of this incongruity has itself shaped modern letters, modern law, and modern life." Informationen zum Autor Ravit Reichman is the Robert and Nancy Carney Assistant Professor of English at Brown University. Klappentext Unhampered by the practical limits lawyers and judges face, literature expresses the unspoken sentiments that underpin legal doctrine. Through readings of Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Hannah Arendt, as well as legal opinions and treatises, this book considers both law and literature as necessary complements in the efforts to take responsibility for the loss and damage inflicted by war. Ravit Reichman expertly charts the terrain that underwrites the law, proposing that the traumas, anxieties, and hopes that shape a culture's relationship to justice are realized in more than practical legal terms alone. Between the world wars, traditional notions of responsibility proved inadequate to address postwar trauma. Legal changes, following changes in literary language, placed new demands on writers to tell the story of law's response to wartime atrocities, and literature began to encourage readers to imagine the world not as it is, but as it ought to be. Our understanding of concepts such as Crimes Against Humanity or Crimes Against the Jewish People is a legacy of modernism's relationship to narrative and subjectivity. The Affective Life of Law examines the inheritance of this legacy. Zusammenfassung Through readings of literary works, legal opinions, and treatises, The Affective Life of Law demonstrates that both law and literature are necessary complements in the efforts to take responsibility for the loss and damage inflicted by the first and second World Wars....
