Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation

ISBN-13: 9780195066173 / Angielski / Twarda / 1991 / 368 str.

Susan Stewart

Opis

From the origins of modern copyright in early eighteenth-century culture to the efforts to represent nature and death in postmodern fiction, this pioneering book explores a series of problems regarding the containment of representation. Stewart focuses on specific cases of "crimes of writing"--the forgeries of George Psalmanazar, the production of "fakelore," the "ballad scandals" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the imposture of Thomas Chatterton, and contemporary legislation regarding graffiti and pornography. In this way, she emphasizes the issues which arise once language is seen as a matter of property and authorship is viewed as a matter of originality. Finally, Stewart demonstrates that crimes of writing are delineated by the law because they specifically undermine the status of the law itself: the crimes illuminate the irreducible fact that law is written and therefore subject to temporality and interpretation.

Recenzje

`Susan Stewart's CRIMES OF WRITING is a valuable and original addition to a growing field of inquiry - one that is adjacent to the study of language and literature, but is more broadly concerned with psychological, social, cultural and even legal issues, than with literature alone... What is, however, highly original is her unusually versatile perceptiveness regarding a range of inscriptive phenomena that transgress and therefore delimit (but also illuminate) the regulatory elements within social systems of representation`. Peter Sacks, Johns Hopkins University.