From law and literature to legality and affect

Abstract

Pronounced dead not far from two decades ago, the sub-discipline of law and literature appears not only to have withstood such damnatio memoriae, but to have expanded and pluralized its forms. While one might contest the stability of the umbrella term, the conventional study of law as represented in the literary canon has digressed and reformulated itself in conjunction with rhetoric, narratology, history, aesthetics, film studies, art criticism, theology, psychoanalysis, jurisliterature and, in Olson’s new treatise, affect theory. The multiplicity of disciplines has as its focal point not so much the literary transmission of law as the narrative relay of legal normativity in multi-modal forms, such as film, television, mobile optimized streaming, artworks, protests and other visual installations. What coheres this trend to remediation of the message of law is a dual transformation. First, law in its traditional monochrome textual form, Gothic typeface, black letters, has transformed into a more nebulous and mutable sense of legality, meaning a more quotidian and subjective interpretation of what is popularly perceived as law, the multiple social relays and reactions to the normative. In the wake of this shift of focus to lex populi or communal senses of legality comes affect theory and the passions that attach a populace to law in the Germanic sense of Rechtsgefühle, meaning popular feeling about the legal environment. Embedded in the political project of feminist theory, the work is driven both by the author’s own affect, her rage against injustice, as well as by a profound appreciation of the effects of the remediation of law in online and visual forms. The book is partly classificatory in that it tracks the various movements within the broadly defined remit of law and literature over the last two decades, but with tendrils that return to the late nineteenth-century German concept of ‘living law’. It is also prescriptive in that it advocates strongly for an affective concept and critical appreciation of the expanded boundaries or collapsible borders that the conjunction of passion and legality promises and promotes. So let me immediately address the straw and tingle, sturm und drang of my thesis, which is that the novel methodological and heuristic conjunction of legality and affect is best understood as a powerfully positive and pericranically proleptic thesis. In ontographic and epistemic terms the generosity of pluralization and the incorporation of the varied forms of the imaginal remediation of legality, aesthetic, poetic, affective and multimodal presented in such rigorous classificatory and beneficially didactic forms provides significant heuristic openings and political potentials while at the same time requiring a certain degree of contestation.