10.25623/conn026-grunewald-1
Grunewald, Ralph
Grunewald
Ralph
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Poetics of Injustice: The Case of Two Mockingbirds
Connotations Society
2017
English literature - 20th century
Law and Literature
Poetic Justice
Lee, Harper
Deskovic, Jeffrey
2017
2017
en-US
Journal Article
10.25623/conn026-full
32 pages
application/pdf
1.0
CC BY-SA 4.0
Connotations - A Journal for Critical Debate, ISSN 0939-5482, Vol. 26.1, p. 54-85
This article is based on the understanding that in law questions of guilt are often reduced and simplified, whereas literary texts can provide a more encompassing picture of a person’s blameworthiness. That leads to two overlapping but also different understandings of justice—poetic and procedural. In this paper, I will contrast these two types of justice and argue that within the legal, mainly procedural, framework questions of the poetic construction of a narrative are often disregarded, although they play a significant role in many stages of a criminal case. Literary texts, on the other hand, show less awareness of the relevance of procedure and the kind of justice it produces. While the tension between these types of justice cannot be fully resolved—they are specific to their respective genres—it will be stressed that law and literature as disciplines can learn from each other. A judge with a heightened awareness of how narratives are constructed poetically will be better equipped to safeguard against wrongful convictions and gain a better understanding of a case in general. And, literary critics who acknowledge that procedure has an intrinsic value in law will expand their understating of a text that touches on such questions.
My argument will be developed in three steps. First, poetic and legal concepts of justice will be contrasted. Then, core differences between the legal and literary discourse will be analyzed in more detail, which is followed by a discussion of how poetic and procedural elements affect two exemplary wrongful conviction cases: the one of Jeffrey Deskovic and the one portrayed in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
Connotations Society