Volume 6, Issue 2

The concept of identity corresponds to the combination of social awareness (self) and social identity (persona), whose meaning changes according to the disciplinary context in which it is studied. Accordingly, the law's role is to create boundaries in order to delineate people's legal identity. Moreover, legal identity is strictly linked to the concept of citizenship; therefore, being a legal citizen is an indispensable requirement for the possession of human rights. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that in The Jew of Malta Barabas's struggle for his wealth (which in truth allows him to exercise part of his rights through the act of buying and owning, and partake in society) and his attempt to twist the law against his opponents actually symbolize a struggle for the recognition of his legal identity. Only the law, in fact, has the capacity to delineate his real identity, i.e. that of a human being, an identity for which he will sacrifice everything in the end.

A large part of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula focuses on the intricacies of property relations, that is the social, legal and personal stakes of ownership. Property rights are thematized vis-à-vis human rights. In the novel the notion of personal property and the idea of subjectivity are intertwined. The evolution of Dracula's identity in the course of the novel moves from that of the wanderer, given his condition of undead, rooted in a place outside history and time (the castle, the snowy wilderness) to that of new capitalistic man, well rooted in civilized society thanks to his acquisition of a mansion. Dracula tries to become part of Western civilization through his possessions and by acquiring a settled position. It is a symbolic sense of geography and possession that epitomizes Dracula's attempt at existing as a legal persona. This also entails the inclusion of a new type of legal identity within the western racial corpus. The right to property is deeply felt by the whole of mankind and considered as intrinsic in the individual's self-identification. The aim of my paper is that of analysing the various functions of property in the novel in the creation of an independent individual.

This essay will analyze how the Gothic representation of wives imprisoned, effaced and even killed by their husbands, literalizes and thereby demystifies the legal abstraction of coverture. Under this legal principle, the wife became an unperson, because her legal identity was “covered” by that of her husband. Through a literal or metaphorical death (enclosure in a castle, convent or a madhouse), the Gothic genre portrays the civil death and the effacement of women's legal identity. The trope of the dangerous male relative (mainly the father or the husband) reflects the patriarchal legal reality responsible for the social death of the woman. Specific attention will be devoted to the novel Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (posthumously published in 1798), in which Wollstonecraft deconstructs the ideology of marriage by which women are exchangeable commodities and are denied their natural rights, and uses the sexualized female body as a revolutionary medium of communication; the essay will then analyze Catherine Perkins Gilmore's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), in which the protagonist, enclosed in a room of a country mansion, entrusts her denounce of the punitive, patriarchal set of institutions that require and actually effect the suppression of women's autonomy and self-expression to her writings (her book of evidence), thus claiming her own individual voice and her struggle for the preservation of her identity.

This paper aims at analysing the relationship between voice and identity in Donoghue's collection of revised fairy tales Kissing the Witch . Such analysis will focus on the connections between the construction of identity, in which the fairy tale plays a fundamental role, and the narratological process. This work will consider firstly the difficulties encountered by a non-fictional telling of the self, when dealing with narrative elements which come from the voice of the Other, and the internalisation of the Other's voice in the construction of self identity, countenancing the legal implications that the concepts of voice and identity, and voice as identity, entail. The analysis moves onto Donoghue's fairy tales as an example of such relationship, which is made clear by the intertextual connections between the thirteen tales of the collection itself. Donoghue uses the female voice for the construction, development, affirmation and even nihilation of her protagonists' identities. This paper will investigate the meaning of vocal emissions through thoughts and songs, as well as the meaning of the lack of such emissions, indicating an aware suppression of the woman's personal identity, dictated by a long tradition of phallocratic supremacy.

The topos of artificial intelligences – robots, cyborgs and androids – has been well-explored extensively throughout the past century in science fiction literature and cinema, building upon contemporary scientific developments and transcending them to fulfil man's Promethean impetus. Speculation about the impact of such liminal beings in human society has raised a number of issues in relation to their position within the social and legal systems. As the man-machine divide is eroded by the appearance of sophisticated machines, almost indistinguishable from humans, the very definition of personhood is called into question. Issues of self-awareness, free-will, and their influence on the legal categorization of humanoid machines is here explored in two science fiction texts: Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and the television series Battlestar Galactica (reimagined, 2003–2009). The legitimacy of the social and legal inequalities reinforcing the human-android divide is challenged in both narrations as artificial intelligences appear to fulfil the Lockean definition of person. A closer focus on twin androids, Pris Stratton and Rachael Rosen in Dick's novel and Boomer and Athena in Battlestar Galactica , shows indeed that androids may develop the capability to exceed their programming and evolve into unique personalities, shaped by their own individual choices and experiences.

Literature can contribute to bioethical debate in several ways: by enabling us to see cases as embedded in specific human contexts, by enhancing our sensitivity to the narratives of others, and by developing a broader outlook to human identity. Both literature and bioethics are interested in the future of humanity and call attention to the dangers of uncontrolled scientific progress, looking for a balance between the excesses of technophobia on the one hand and technophilia on the other. In a context in which scientists face increasingly difficult ethical choices, novels such as Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood can help us understand what it means to be human, which after all is the ultimate goal of all scientific as well as humanistic endeavors.

“Law and literature” is the study of the utilities of the reciprocal ties between the two domains. Classic approaches divide the field into two main patterns of study. One is the literary approach to law, i.e. the study of law as literature, which primarily implements literary theory and criticism in legal texts. The second is law in literature, which investigates literary expressions of law and the various ways law is depicted in literature. Of late, a new paradigm labeled “literature alongside law” has been suggested. This paradigm neither puts the emphasis on one field nor utilizes one for the service of the other. Rather, it investigates both fields, viewed one beside the other, as interwoven cultural expressions of a complex fabric of the human condition. This duality exposes the various ties infrequently noted within the confines of the former classic approaches. This paradigm is closely tied and evoked by an old yet interesting source of scholarly inspiration: the Jewish rabbinic combination of Halacha and Aggadah. They can be appreciated as the religious parallel model of their paradigm and of contemporary law and literature scholarship as a whole. Halacha is the body of religious legal norms and bending interpretations as expounded by Jewish Rabbis. Aggadah is the body of narratives, stories, myths, advice, morals and parables transmitted traditionally alongside Halacha. Rabbis, as the early scholars of law and literature, pondered the nature of this duality and the prospective worth of its inseparability. In comparison, Christianity and Canon law seem to reject this model and any equal treatment of literature alongside law in its central works. Due to various historical and theological reasons, this duality was denounced. While the Jewish model has been widely investigated, no similar attempts have been made as regards the Christian model. This paper seeks to present these two religious models within the confines of law and literature scholarship, to compare both and, especially, to ponder possible meanings for the repulsive tension between law and literature in the Christian model. The article concludes that law and literature is a two-sided coin, much like the two religious models. One seeks better truth in the constant tension of law and literature. The other preserves its truth in the polar tension of law and literature. These two models ought to be equally valued for law and literature scholarship.

Generally human essence comprises a huge number of facets which shape our verbal and non-verbal behaviour. As an explicit form of social behaviour, speech is largely based on a number of indispensable elements which altogether shape the general framework of the given communicative context. The aim of the present paper is to discuss one of the ingredients of the communicative context – the speakers' mental world; it is mainly devoted to the analysis of emotional memory and its impact on interpersonal relations. The speakers' past emotional experience is also part of mutually shared background knowledge which determines their choice of language data on a particular occasion of speech event. To ensure a better understanding of the multifaceted nature of emotions, the problem will be reviewed from the pragmatic perspective, taking the essence of the supreme cognitive processes into account. The role of emotional background knowledge alongside with verbal and non-verbal means of manifesting emotions will be studied on the main judicial actors. The illustrating examples represent extracts taken from crime fiction and in particular from Mark Gimenez's The Colour of Law .

Thomas Hobbes's philosophical system rests on the priority and centrality of the body. Not only is this centrality apparent in his texts devoted to physical and metaphysical issues, but also in those parts of his books dedicated to legal and political matters. My contention in this article is that Hobbes's entire writings are haunted by a de facto argument which, short of “demonstrating”, sought at least to “monstrate” a scene of destitution where bodies are produced. His compulsive resort to this argument was not fuelled only by his scientific and metaphysical interests in the collisional tendency of the human body; it was also an inducement of his largely overlooked literary education. In my view, Hobbes political imagination was not only informed by strictly philosophical argument, but also shaped by readings of Greek authors like Thucydides and Homer, and by the Renaissance spectacle of resilient, soulless and agonistic corporality furnished by Kyd, Nashe, Shakespeare and Jacobean playwrights.