“There Were No Longer Any Laws”: Voices of Authority, Complicity, and Resistance in Totalitarian Dystopias and Holocaust Imaginings
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Chris Boge
Chris Boge is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Cologne, an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he teaches in the Crime Fiction and the Law module, and a recipient of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities Visiting Fellowship. Among his recent academic publications are “Suspending Democracy: Vigilante Justice and the Rule of Law in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy” in
Crime Fiction and the Law , eds. Maria Aristodemou, Fiona Macmillan, and Patricia Tuitt (Birkbeck Law Press/Routledge, 2015) and “Crimes against (Super)Humanity: Graphic Forms of Justice and Governance” inGraphic Justice: Intersections of Comics and Law , ed. Thomas Giddens (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015).
Abstract
This article analyses five landmarks in totalitarian and dystopian fiction from a law-and-literature perspective, thus comparing works published between the 1920s and the first decade of the twenty-first century that fictionalize diametrically opposed ideologies of countries such as Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and the United States of America: Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning work Maus; Philip Roth’s “dark, humane masterpiece” (The Times) of “faction,” The Plot Against America; Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, without which George Orwell’s modern classic Nineteen Eighty-Four would be unthinkable; and V for Vendetta by Alan Moore, one of the most acclaimed writers working in the graphic medium today.
About the author
Chris Boge is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Cologne, an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he teaches in the Crime Fiction and the Law module, and a recipient of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities Visiting Fellowship. Among his recent academic publications are “Suspending Democracy: Vigilante Justice and the Rule of Law in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy” in Crime Fiction and the Law, eds. Maria Aristodemou, Fiona Macmillan, and Patricia Tuitt (Birkbeck Law Press/Routledge, 2015) and “Crimes against (Super)Humanity: Graphic Forms of Justice and Governance” in Graphic Justice: Intersections of Comics and Law, ed. Thomas Giddens (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015).
©2015 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Voices of Power/Power of Voices
- Voices of Spectators and Audience Power
- “There Were No Longer Any Laws”: Voices of Authority, Complicity, and Resistance in Totalitarian Dystopias and Holocaust Imaginings
- Caesar’s Body in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Sacralization and De-sacralization of Power
- Legal Oracularism and Theological Prophetism. Fleshly Silences Across Memories and Traditions
- “What Is Royalty Without a Voice?” The Performance of Power in The King’s Speech
- Is There Voice Without Law? On The Road
- Voice, Incarnation and the United States Supreme Court
- Disputes and the Differend: Literary Strategies to Say the Unspeakable
- The Working Class Goes to the Movies: Labour Law and Thatcherism in British Films
- War in Words: The Tricycle Theatre’s Re-voicing of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry
- Research
- Legal Systemology and the Geopolitics of Roman Law: A Response to Stuart Elden’s Critique of Carl Schmitt’s Spatial Ontology
- Speech and Graphomena: The Power of Apuleius’ Words in Court and in Translation
- Book Review
- Mireille Hildebrandt and Jeanne Gaakeer: Human Law and Computer Law: Comparative Perspectives
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Voices of Power/Power of Voices
- Voices of Spectators and Audience Power
- “There Were No Longer Any Laws”: Voices of Authority, Complicity, and Resistance in Totalitarian Dystopias and Holocaust Imaginings
- Caesar’s Body in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Sacralization and De-sacralization of Power
- Legal Oracularism and Theological Prophetism. Fleshly Silences Across Memories and Traditions
- “What Is Royalty Without a Voice?” The Performance of Power in The King’s Speech
- Is There Voice Without Law? On The Road
- Voice, Incarnation and the United States Supreme Court
- Disputes and the Differend: Literary Strategies to Say the Unspeakable
- The Working Class Goes to the Movies: Labour Law and Thatcherism in British Films
- War in Words: The Tricycle Theatre’s Re-voicing of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry
- Research
- Legal Systemology and the Geopolitics of Roman Law: A Response to Stuart Elden’s Critique of Carl Schmitt’s Spatial Ontology
- Speech and Graphomena: The Power of Apuleius’ Words in Court and in Translation
- Book Review
- Mireille Hildebrandt and Jeanne Gaakeer: Human Law and Computer Law: Comparative Perspectives
