Modernity, Experience, and the Law in The Education of Henry Adams
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Mara Logaldo
Mara Logaldo is Assistant Professor of English at IULM and a member of AIDEL. Her research interests are mainly focused on rhetoric, particularly metaphor, English and Anglo-American literature and culture, media discourse, language and technology. She has published monographs on Henry James (Figura e rappresentazione in Henry James: 1896–1901 , 2000), on text analysis and composition writing (Writing for the Media , 2003), on New Journalism and the documentary-novel (Cronaca come romanzo: Truman Capote e il New Journalism , 2003). She has also published essays on urban slang (``Only the Immigrants Can Speak the Queen's English these Days but all the Kids Have a Jamaican Accent,'' 2010), on literature and the law (``Crime Sublime: Literary Mercy and the Law in Truman Capote'sIn Cold Blood ,'' 2008; ``Capote's Garden in Hell: The Spectacle of the Law and the Law of the Spectacle,'' 2011). Among her latest publications is the volumeAugmented Linguistics. Language and Communication in the Age of Augmented Reality , 2012).
Abstract
In Henry Adam's riveting third-person autobiography posthumously published (The Education of Henry Adams, 1918) the concept of law is scrutinized in all its possible meanings. The moral law, the law of politics, the law of economics, the natural law, etc. are all regarded – however tentatively – as closely interconnected ways of organizing experience which may throw light both on universal issues and on historically determined, distinct features of American culture and society. Adams also explored therein the strict juridical meanings of Law. Notwithstanding his recurring paraleptic claims to ignorance on the subject, ``outlawry,'' and ``accidental education'' acquired through direct experience rather than on law books, Adams was actually a learned and fine analyst who constantly attempted ``to bring the case within a general law.'' Covering the period between 1838 and 1905, however, he presented the Law as a principle which, along with the ``democratic dogma'' instilled to him by his father and grandfather, was rapidly decaying, due to the abrupt changes brought about by the Civil War and, more generally, by the ground-breaking scientific and technological discoveries of the time. What Adams ultimately derives from experience is that ``the law altogether, as path of education, vanished in April 1861, leaving a million young men planted in the mud of a lawless world'' while struggling to catch up with the multiplicity and anarchy of the modern multiverse.
About the author
Mara Logaldo is Assistant Professor of English at IULM and a member of AIDEL. Her research interests are mainly focused on rhetoric, particularly metaphor, English and Anglo-American literature and culture, media discourse, language and technology. She has published monographs on Henry James (Figura e rappresentazione in Henry James: 1896–1901, 2000), on text analysis and composition writing (Writing for the Media, 2003), on New Journalism and the documentary-novel (Cronaca come romanzo: Truman Capote e il New Journalism, 2003). She has also published essays on urban slang (``Only the Immigrants Can Speak the Queen's English these Days but all the Kids Have a Jamaican Accent,'' 2010), on literature and the law (``Crime Sublime: Literary Mercy and the Law in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood,'' 2008; ``Capote's Garden in Hell: The Spectacle of the Law and the Law of the Spectacle,'' 2011). Among her latest publications is the volume Augmented Linguistics. Language and Communication in the Age of Augmented Reality, 2012).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Law, Literature and (Popular) Culture
- State v. Estate: Jane Austen and the Law of Inheritance
- Women, Property and Identity in Victorian Legal Culture: Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White
- Interrelations Between Law and Culture: Iain M. Banks's The Player of Games
- Working at the Intersection of the Humanities, Law and Technology: Digital Humanities and the ``Two Cultures''
- For a New Semantics of Differences: Cultural Exception and the Law
- True Blood: Multicultural Vampires in Contemporary Society
- Research
- Legal Liturgies: The Aesthetic Foundation of Positive Law
- Modernity, Experience, and the Law in The Education of Henry Adams
- Violation of Human Rights in Holocaust/Post-Holocaust Era
- Defining Legal Vagueness: A Contradiction in Terms?
- Book Review
- Book Review
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Law, Literature and (Popular) Culture
- State v. Estate: Jane Austen and the Law of Inheritance
- Women, Property and Identity in Victorian Legal Culture: Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White
- Interrelations Between Law and Culture: Iain M. Banks's The Player of Games
- Working at the Intersection of the Humanities, Law and Technology: Digital Humanities and the ``Two Cultures''
- For a New Semantics of Differences: Cultural Exception and the Law
- True Blood: Multicultural Vampires in Contemporary Society
- Research
- Legal Liturgies: The Aesthetic Foundation of Positive Law
- Modernity, Experience, and the Law in The Education of Henry Adams
- Violation of Human Rights in Holocaust/Post-Holocaust Era
- Defining Legal Vagueness: A Contradiction in Terms?
- Book Review
- Book Review
