Body Language: Representation in Action

An argument that activity provides a useful template for thinking about representation and that deeds are themselves representational: our representing of the world consists, in part, in certain sorts of deeds that we perform in the world. In "Body Language", Mark Rowlands argues that the problem of representation - how it is possible for one item to represent another - has been exacerbated by the assimilation of representation to the category of the word.

Robert Browning, whose normality in appearance and conversation pleased sensible folk and shocked idolaters, summed up in two stanzas the difference between the popular conception of a poet and the real truth. One might almost take the first stanza as representing the Irish and the second the English temperament.

Representing Justice: Stories of Law and Literature
TTC

(24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
Taught by Susan Sage Heinzelman
The University of Texas at Austin
Ph.D., University of Western Ontario

Great literature can be the means of understanding as well as creating our world - by teaching and reinforcing society's laws, articulating its values, and enforcing the social contracts that unite us as a culture. What if literature itself generated our ideas and feelings about justice, marriage and family, property, authority, race, or gender? What if it enflamed our determination to pursue justice - or, conversely, undermined our ability to detect injustice?
___What if law in all its variations - from religious commandments to oral tradition to codified statute - embraced its own narrative assumptions to the point of absorbing purely literary conventions as a means of more forcefully arguing its points in the legal arena?
___And what if this dynamic relationship between written and unwritten laws and literature is constantly evolving? How do law and literature influence or reflect one other? And what lessons might we draw from their symbiotic relationship?