> On May 10, 3:07 pm, torg nospam.com> wrote:

>> Dirty Rat wrote:

>>> I just finished a paper on American criminal law in the 19th century,
>>> which I'm now tempted to copy and paste. The operative function of the
>>> law in the 19th century was as a fault system that generated “rules of
>>> liability." The legal system delegitimated even serious injury in
>>> people whose behavior was criminalized. I discussed Bartleby and Babo
>>> from Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno." These
>>> stories register narratives in which characters of questionable
>>> criminality are managed as criminals by a legal apparatus. In
>>> "Bartleby," an uncooperative yet innocuous scrivener Bartleby, having
>>> been charged of no actual crime, is escorted to a criminal
>>> institution. In the latter, an incalcitrant Senegalian captive called
>>> Babo is criminalized and given a terminal sentence by the Spanish
>>> tribunal. In my paper, I examine the ways in which Bartleby and Babo
>>> are able to establish a sort of resistance to the formal legal
>>> imperatives that regulate their worlds ("Benito Cereno," for example,
>>> appends a deposition, and the community in "Bartleby" constantly tries
>>> to criminalize his non-criminal obstinancy) and the significance of
>>> this resistance. I argue that their narratives are above the law,
>>> granting legitimacy in a genre space that is not responsible for the
>>> regulation of life or individual subjective identity, I also argue
>>> that the law is reinscribed in any legal subject’s reading of these
>>> stories and in negotiating the sense of such elided adjudicatory
>>> narratives as Babo’s and Bartleby’s. The narratives constitute an
>>> alternative space for the potential retrospective construction of
>>> formal law.
>>> Dirty Rat

>> hey, Ratty, that paper was even more vacuous and predestrian than your
>> ordinary lies, you're funny- Hide quoted text -
>>
>> - Show quoted text -

>
> That wasn't the paper, Torg. And if you actually had anything
> validating to say about anything that I actually considered to be
> worthwhile, I would critically reassess all kinds of things about my
> life.
>
> Dirty Rat