In David Lodge’s send-ups of academic life, scholarly pilgrims jet from conference to conference, searching for good weather, congenial cocktail hours, and some harmless jockeying for professional place. But no one ever took the events seriously enough to suggest publishing the papers they delivered. This, however, is a confessional age. No longer content with the private pleasures of a minor tax advantage, academics now feel impelled to share the results of their boondoggled holidays with the rest of us. Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law is just such a book.
Touted by Yale University Press as an “important volume” and a “provocative and fascinating exploration of the entanglement of storytelling, the law, and justice in America,” the book is an assemblage of twenty-one papers delivered by an assortment of well-known academics and various other guests at a symposium convened to discuss the currently hot topic of “narrative.” It is academia’s answer to commercial publishing’s “instant book.” Or, perhaps a hardcover publication is the price of getting this “stunning array of experts” (Yale’s publicity kit again) to New Haven in the middle of February.
From the opening pair of essays by the volume’s editors—Yale professors Peter Brooks (comparative literature) and Paul Gewirtz (law, but better known as Zoë Baird’s husband)—to the closing pièce de résistance by none other than Catharine MacKinnon, the volume fairly strains with effort to celebrate the postmodern sensibility. Like so many interdisciplinary affairs these days, it promises literary critics trying to sound
