Verona’s Unit

Equity and Alterity in English Literature from the Renaissance to the 20th Century: the Inequity of the Law in Hegemonic Relations (class, gender and ethnicity)

 

 

The Verona group will focus its attention on the discourse of the inequitable behaviour of the law towards alterities. The wide-ranging term “alterity” creates numerous connections with critical theories and positions which examine the role of representation, hegemony and diversity, such as – within cultural studies – the culture of the image and of representation, feminist criticism, gender studies, and post-colonial theories centring on cultural alterity. The intersections between these multiple critical discourses have given rise to interesting analyses of cultural and social phenomena.

The group will attempt to demonstrate the indeterminacy of juridical doctrine and to show how the law treats the “other” (in terms of class, ethnicity and gender) differently in an historical period that spans the Renaissance to modern times. The hermeneutical interdisciplinary analysis is aimed at demonstrating how specific social groups, social classes, or economic institutions profit from legal choices which are ideologically biased. This analysis will also demonstrate the iniquity of juridical culture based exclusively on the expectations of centralised power (political, economical, and patriarchal), which aims at legitimating its own privileges. Making use of a post-structuralist critical approach (in particular American decostruction and the aesthetics of reader-response criticism, on whose critical tenets jurists themselves have based their literary/legal investigations) and thus problematizing the discursive dimension of jurisprudence itself, the research group aims to demonstrate how the law has, in the historical period under consideration, justified the domination and the privileging of certain classes over determinate alterities through its abstract and specialized discourse, which pretends to be neutral in its methods and results.

The precise aim of this research, therefore, is that of highlighting what is encoded within the juridical doctrine itself, that is, a reflection of the iniquitous ideology ingrained within the law. In this sense the research is connected with those critical theories which deal with ideology, legitimation and the mystification of centralised power, explaining how the law is a form of ideology which on the whole operates in favour of the dominant groups.

 

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Equity, Literature and Law

The thread that connects the members of the group will be developed across a period which spans from the Renaissance – when a hegemonic representation of alterities, although fluid, begins to be outlined, as is proven by numerous texts of the time – through the modern age, in which rigid codification of difference in the literary text and in the juridical system develop at the same time, up to the contemporary age, in which such a codification takes on new and more subtle forms. In this context the function of the literary text is to make overt and to disseminate those “invisible harms” that, since they are neither acknowledged nor codified by the system, cannot be compensated. The law, which pursues “universal” goals and which is structured – following a process of “monumentalization” – in a rigid configuration, seems to be destined to sanction an inequitable treatment of alterities, whereas literature, by giving voice to the dissenting Other, and, making “visible” that which is not contemplated by the law, represents emblematic cases which are useful for a redefinition of the legal system itself.
In fact, the law should not be divorced from human feeling. The dichotomy which is often created is that between a rigid legalism (that is a rigorous application of the norm) and its discretionary reading, which takes into account the variety of human nature and the multiplicity of social cases. The idea of equality before the law has been devised precisely to compensate the patent inequality between people.

How has the relationship between law and literature developed? On which theoretical and applicative basis is such an interrelation between the two disciplines possible? In which ways has literary criticism been appropriated by jurisprudence? Which are the exemplary international contributions to such a comparative critico-legal approach? To these and many other questions Richard Weisberg, Peter Goodrich, Arthur Jacobson, Ian Ward, the internationally famous scholars in this interdisciplinary field (of which they are the main representatives) who are involved in this research project have partially answered but will provide further answers. Let us consider the seminal books by Richard Weisberg The Failure of the Word (1984) and Poetics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (1992), by Peter Goodrich Reading the Law (1988), Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law (1995) and Legal Discourse (1988), by Ian Ward Law and Literature (1995), Kantianism, Postmodernism and Critical Legal Thought (1997) and Shakespeare and the Legal Imagination (1999). In particular Weisberg’s book, The Failure of the Word, inaugurated this interdisciplinary field which has had critical dissemination all over the world and which has been given resonance in Italy by Daniela Carpi. The research group, in fact, is honoured by the contribution of these higly important international scholars, whose enquiry will focus on the concept of equity which involves not only legal issues, but also ethical, moral, and humanist concerns.

 

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Equity and the “woman question”

The literary-historical periods involved in the research begin with the Renaissance, which is pervaded by strong schisms and dichotomies in its social and connective fabric and which anticipates further developments in the crisis in the contemporary age. Daniela Carpi will devote her contribution to this period. The “woman question” itself is one of the most modern themes which was beginning to be discussed in Renaissance literature and which solicited some considerations among the playwrights that constitute a real anticipation of the feminist debates in our age. A tradition of English writers whose production meaningfully exemplifies some practical applications of legal readings to the texts will therefore be considered. Some significant examples may be found in the works of William Shakespeare and John Webster, which consider the problem of inequitable justice as exemplified in the marriages portrayed in Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice and The White Devil. These examples demonstrate how personal free will is not defended as a good in itself, but as a form of protection of “property” which is the real target of penal law. In fact, the marriages of the daughters represent a financial damage to their fathers, since, in the Renaissance period, marriages were a useful means of economic exchange and political alliances.

 

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Equity and the “Scottish Renaissance”

The relationships between the law, justice, and equity become a central theme in Scottish literature in the period between the wars, and this constitutes the research field of Carla Sassi. In this period, the so-called “Scottish Renaissance”, writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Naomi Mitchison, Catherine Carswell, and Helen Cruickshank articulate in their works a strong anti-imperialist stance and a call for a de-centred (or pluralistic) cultural model. If the Scottish Enlightenment, with its stress on ‘civil society’, had promoted in an entirely different context the ‘Nicomachean’ idea that justice is possible only within the institutional arrangements of a political community, this model of justice would be seen as no longer possible, or, at any rate, as much more difficult at the beginning of the 20th century, a period which has come to terms with the inequalities (in terms of class, race, and gender) endorsed by British institutions. The friction between equity and the (British) institutional and political framework sanctions a deep fracture, and the Scottish literary text becomes, in this context, both a paradigmatic model and a means of equitable judgement.

 

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Equity and “personal identity”

The injustice and/or the unresolved interrogatives of the iniquity of the law will also be analysed within the field of “personal identity” and its most recent definitions, that is, in light of a theoretical approach in the studies on identity – developed over the last three decades – which highlight the passage from a generically and doubtfully “referential” I (as in Lejeune et al) to a cognitive “referential” I, as in the latest works by Paul John Eakin. Maria Teresa Bindella’s area of research will be the autobiography, the literary biography and, more generally speaking, the narrative production of the 19th and 20th centuries. In all these literary genres, in fact, the textual identity is posited as an alterity in respect to a collective identity – which is objectifies and makes uniform – and it efficiently denouces and alerts us to the iniquity of civil and religious norms. This personal alterity tries to protect itself from these norms through complex and (not always) adequate defensive mechanisms, such as fiction, the reticent-absence, the avoidance of a centred and centring I, and the multiplication of identities. All these strategies also aim at creating disorienting and deceiving effects. Special attention will be devoted to the biographical and autobiographical writings of Robert Louis Stevenson and to other narrative texts which are considered as (auto)biographical narrative models – such as Dr Jekyll’s statement in the chapter entitled “Henry Jekyll ‘s Full Statement of the Case”. Bearing in mind both the methodology illustrated above and the (self)-portrait dedicated to Stevenson by Richard Holmes in his book Footsteps, the main biographers of Stevenson will be the object of a parallel enquiry, focusing on the ethical and juridical issues which have always touched on the biographical genre.

 

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Equity and pornography

The project will also focus its attention on Feminist critical issues: in fact Chiara Battisti and Alice Bendinelli highlight the way that pornography can be considered as a violation of woman. Pornography has historically been a way in which men institute their status as subjects by controlling “others” who have the status of objects. As Susanne Kappeler asserts in The Pornography of Representation, the dominant subjectivity in patriarchal culture is constructed through objectifying “others”. They will focus their attention on pornography and obscenity in British literature (Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, Nicholas Royle), where obscenity is considered as the legal definition of pornography. In this sense it is important to underline that, according to law dictionaries, the courts have had difficulty making a clear non –subjective definition of the term “obscene” since “one person’s obscenity is another person’s art”. The aim of their analysis is to highlight the evolution, from the legal point of view, of anti-pornography and anti-obscenity laws, with particular attention to proposed legislations which recognize pornography as a systematic practice of sexual exploitation that violates women’s civil rights by undermining women’s equality. They will attempt to demonstrate the links between legal issues and Feminist critical issues concerning the iniquitous treatment of women. They also mean to highlight how the legal system often makes recourse to the laws on pornography and obscenity, transforming them from an important instrument for the protection of women’s civil rights into an instrument of control and repression. It is important to underline that prosecutions of obscenity and other censorial tools have often been used disproportionately. In fact, important feminist works, such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, have often been attacked as obscene or pornographic.

 

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