Volume 7, Issue 1

The sex murderer Moosbrugger, whose mental competence to stand trial is at the heart of Robert Musil's novel The Man without Qualities , attracts our attention to the scientific debate on determinism that has captivated legal scholars since the late nineteenth century. This debate raises the question of the dehumanization of scientific rationality in matters concerning the treatment of the criminally insane. The nineteenth-century concept of law as science led to a profound belief in the transparency of objective knowledge that Weber referred to as the disenchantment of the world. This article focuses on the blurring of the borders between fact and fiction by means of an analysis of The Man without Qualities . Its aim is to highlight the Erklären-Verstehen controversy that lies at the heart of the epistemological debate and the methodological struggle between the natural sciences and the humanities at the end of the nineteenth century, one that has had far-reaching implications for law and literature.

In this article, I will discuss the concept of narration, its role within a legal context, and the relation between narration and anti-narration in Robert Musil's modernist experiment, The Man without Qualities . I will argue that, through the portrayal of Moosbrugger, Musil's aim is to show that the rationality of the legal system is based on false narrations, which prevent us from understanding living reality. I will further discuss the interest of the Moosbrugger case within the novel, and discuss whether Moosbrugger is to be seen as a Dionysian hero or a possibilitist. In the final section, I will argue that Moosbrugger can be seen as a homo sacer , as defined by Giorgio Agamben, and that it is due to this position that he is able to question our presuppositions about the criminal.

In this article I intend to historicise Musil's discussion of responsibility and agency by tracing the genealogy of Moosbrugger in light of Michel Foucault's writings on power. Two historical roots of this figure are of particular interest: early nineteenth-century French alienism and late nineteenth-century positivist criminology. Both of these traditions made the demi-fou, i.e. the partially insane, the touchstone of a critique of law and law's conception of man. Through the work of early nineteenth-century alienists, the madman intervenes in discourses on criminal responsibility for the first time. For late nineteenth-century criminology this body becomes a model for a society that must be defended. Moosbrugger is the offspring of these traditions but as a modernist figure he is also something more: he is, as Musil says, our collective dream.

This essay sets out to investigate the ways in which the “laws” of genre are negotiated in a range of Shakespeare's plays, particularly those where questions of “form” and “content” seem to be in opposition to each other. Traditional accounts of genre prove to be inadequate to account for the shifts of emphasis that take place as Shakespeare moves from one genre to another, with the result that it is possible to detect the existence of various generic motifs in plays that are classified as, nominally at any rate, either “comedies” or “tragedies.” A selective series of examples are adduced to argue that it is difficult to assign a generic identity to a Shakespeare play without invoking other genres and other rules that govern them. In part, the argument also impinges upon the issue of “sources” since Shakespeare re-visits and re-uses motifs and themes in plays that are nominally identified as belonging to different genres. Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labours Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream furnish a number of examples, as do The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing and Othello . Throughout his oeuvre Shakespeare can be seen to be negotiating (and transgressing) the laws of genre, sometimes offering alternatives, but in other cases, such as The Winter's Tale amalgamating genres that in earlier plays remained relatively distinct. To this extent Shakespeare can be seen to be resisting the pull of genre, and we are left with the question of the extent to which the retrospective imposition of generic rules is a function of the commentator, rather than the dramatist.

Dr Jekyll's will represents the focus of Stevenson's novella; it is the legal instrument used by Jekyll to attain an official recognition of Mr Hyde's legal persona, but it is presented from the beginning with ambiguous undertones. The reflections of the lawyer, Mr Utterson, who is trying to understand such document in all its implications, underline a legal conflict between the lawyer's perspective, which draws upon the recognized legal tenets, and Jekyll's perspective, who tries to apply the discourse of property to the body and in so doing opens up a fantastic dimension which cannot be reconciled with Hyde's prospective legal status.

The paper investigates the relationship between human rights and the Laws in contemporary India. Aravind Adiga's debut novel The White Tiger offers an unflattering portrait of a young Hindu from a small village on the banks of the Ganga, where no-one is permitted to improve his miserable living conditions within an ethical realm of dignity. The narrator believes that this is due to the passivity of Indians who uncritically accept their caste-duties, as their only possible way of life. On the contrary, the main character is clearly unafraid of stating his own will and self-determination by first performing a linguistic act and then by killing his master. The Vedas, the Dharmashastras and the Constitution are the three main sources of Right for Hindus, and it is in their misapplication that the conflict between Dharma and civil law, Right and culture emerge in the novel.