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Turning Wine Into Water: Water As Privileged Signifier In The Grapes Of Wrath, David N. Cassuto
Turning Wine Into Water: Water As Privileged Signifier In The Grapes Of Wrath, David N. Cassuto
David N Cassuto
I will argue that The Grapes of Wrath represents an indictment of the American myth of the garden and its accompanying myth of the frontier. The lever with which Steinbeck pries apart and ultimately dismantles these fictions is a critique of the agricultural practices that created the Dust Bowl and then metamorphosed into a new set of norms which continued to victimize both the land and its inhabitants. Both nineteenth-century homesteading (based on the Homestead Act of 1862) and agribusiness, its twentieth century descendant (born from the failure of the Homestead Act), relied on the (mis)use of water to accomplish …
'Mass Of Madness': Jurisprudence In E.M. Forster's A Passage To India, Allen P. Mendenhall
'Mass Of Madness': Jurisprudence In E.M. Forster's A Passage To India, Allen P. Mendenhall
Allen Mendenhall
Law-and-literature scholars have paid scant attention to E. M. Forster’s oeuvre, which abounds in legal information and which situates itself in a unique jurisprudential context. Of all his novels, A Passage to India (1924) interrogates the law most rigorously, especially as it implicates massive programs of ‘liberal’ imperialism and ‘humanitarian’ intervention, as well as less grand but equally dubious legal apparatuses – jail, bail, discovery, courtrooms – that police and pervert Chandrapore, the fictional Indian city in which the novel is set. The study of law in Anglo-India is particularly telling, if troubling, because India served as ‘a model for …
Transnational Law: An Essay In Definition With A Polemic Addendum, Allen P. Mendenhall
Transnational Law: An Essay In Definition With A Polemic Addendum, Allen P. Mendenhall
Allen Mendenhall
What is transnational law? Various procedures and theories have emanated from this slippery signifier, but in general academics and legal practitioners who use the term have settled on certain common meanings for it. My purpose in this article is not to disrupt but to clarify these meanings by turning to literary theory and criticism that regularly address transnationality. Cultural and postcolonial studies are the particular strains of literary theory and criticism to which I will attend. To review “transnational law,” examining its literary inertia and significations, is the objective of this article, which does not purport to settle the matter …
Shakespeare's Place In Law-And-Literature, Allen P. Mendenhall
Shakespeare's Place In Law-And-Literature, Allen P. Mendenhall
Allen Mendenhall
Nearly every Anglo-American law school offers a course called Law-and-Literature. Nearly all of these courses assign one or more readings from Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Why study Shakespeare in law school? That is the question at the heart of these courses. Some law professors answer the question in terms of cultivating moral sensitivity, fine-tuning close-reading skills, or practicing interpretive strategies on literary rather than legal texts. Most of these professors insist on an illuminating nexus between two supposedly autonomous disciplines. The history of how Shakespeare became part of the legal canon is more complicated than these often defensive, syllabus-justifying declarations allow. This …
The Oft-Ignored Mr. Turton: The Role Of District Collector In A Passage To India, Allen P. Mendenhall
The Oft-Ignored Mr. Turton: The Role Of District Collector In A Passage To India, Allen P. Mendenhall
Allen Mendenhall
E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India presents Brahman Hindu jurisprudence as an alternative to British rule of law, a utilitarian jurisprudence that hinges on mercantilism, central planning, and imperialism. Building on John Hasnas’s critiques of rule of law and Murray Rothbard’s critiques of Benthamite utilitarianism, this essay argues that Forster’s depictions of Brahman Hindu in the novel endorse polycentric legal systems. Mr. Turton is the local district collector whose job is to pander to both British and Indian interests; positioned as such, Turton is a site for critique and comparison. Forster uses Turton to show that Brahman Hindu jurisprudence is …