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Human Dignity And The Claim Of Meaning: Athenian Tragic Drama And Supreme Court Decisions, James Boyd White
Human Dignity And The Claim Of Meaning: Athenian Tragic Drama And Supreme Court Decisions, James Boyd White
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I am going to bring together what may seem at first to be two extremely different institutions for the creation of public meaning, namely classical Athenian tragedy and the Supreme Court opinion.1 My object is not so much to draw lines of similarity and distinction between them, as a cultural analyst might do, as to try to capture something of what I believe is centrally at work in both institutions, in fact essential to what each at its best achieves. I can frame it as a question: How is it that the best instances of each genre (for I will …
Reading Texts, Reading Traditions: African Masks And American Law, James Boyd White
Reading Texts, Reading Traditions: African Masks And American Law, James Boyd White
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My subject in this Essay is the relation between a text or other artifact and the tradition against which it acts. I want to begin by borrowing from a book that seems to me to represent a model-not the only model, of course, but a very good one-of a certain kind of cultural investigation. The book is Inventing Masks by Z.S. Strother, an art historian at Columbia University who specializes in African art. Its material subject is a set of face masks made by the Central Pende, an African people in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.