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Capital Letters sheds new light on how literature has dealt with
society's most violent legal institution, the death penalty. It
investigates this question through the works of three major French
authors with markedly distinct political convictions and literary
styles: Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and Albert Camus. Working
at the intersection of poetics, ethics, and law, Eve Morisi
uncovers an unexpected transhistorical dialogue on both the modern
death penalty and the ends and means of literature after the French
Revolution. Through close textual analysis, careful
contextualization, and the critique of violence forged by Giorgio
Agamben, Michel Foucault, and RenE Girard, Morisi reveals that,
despite their differences, Hugo, Baudelaire, and Camus converge in
questioning France's humanitarian redefinition of capital
punishment dating from the late eighteenth century. Conversely,
capital justice leads all three writers to interrogate the
functions, tools, and limits of their art. Capital Letters shows
that the key modern debate on the political and moral
responsibility, or autonomy, of literature crystallizes around the
death penalty. Inflecting traditional modes of representation and
writing self-reflexively or self-critically, Hugo, Baudelaire, and
Camus unsettle the commonly accepted divide between strictly
aesthetic and politically committed writing. Form, rather than
overtly political argument, at once conveys an ethical critique of
justice and reflects on the possibilities, and duties, of
literature.
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