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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies
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The Failure of the Word - The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction (Paperback, New Ed)
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The Failure of the Word - The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction (Paperback, New Ed)
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The cruel power of misdirected words, artfully structured but
spiritually empty and bearing the stamp of law or legalistic
reasoning, is a persistent theme in the modern novel. Richard
Weisberg, who has written extensively on both literature and law,
explores the role of legalism and its abuses in eight major novels
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning with
Dostoevski and moving by way of trenchant analyses of Flaubert and
Camus, Weisberg culminates his argument in a brilliantly
revisionist reading of Melville's Billy Budd. In each of the novels
treated, Weisberg sees a verbally gifted central character relying
on wordiness to avoid or distort previously revealed truths. He
argues that the malaise Nietzsche called ressentiment goads these
characters to verbalizations that do violence to others and,
ironically, indict their very creators. He identifies the
legalistic theme as the major mode of iconoclasm in modern fiction
and the source of its holocaustic vision. Writers, he reflects,
viewed with profound skepticism their culture's tendency to
substitute complex narrative formalism for earlier, absolute
approaches to justice. In this, Weisberg concludes, their works
anticipated the jurisprudential discourse of today. "The Failure of
the Word is a creative, provocative, and learned work, written with
style and feeling. Weisberg brings to bear on his core themes (the
legalistic proclivity and ressentiment) a wide body of knowledge
and thought in law and philosophy, literary history and
theory."-Robert L. Jackson, Yale University
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