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Rousseau's Emile

Eric Engle, University of Bremen, has published "Law and Literature: Instilling Norms by Fable in Rousseau's Emile." Here is the abstract.

The Law and Literature movement proposes that legal interpretation can be improved by borrowing methods from literary interpretation, by seeing legal decisions as stories, and by examining literature from a legal perspective. In Emile Rousseau presents us his Bildungsroman and educative novella about a Model Couple, Emile (the hypostasized Rousseau) and Sophie (the wise, sturdy farm girl). Rousseau recounts several stories in Emile, about false rape claims, faithless partners, women who try to be men and fail and in all a series of stories set around the theme of super-responsibility of women to be in the end: baby factories, to make soldiers for the state. Without intending to, Rousseau is comedic in presenting images of women that by today's standards are pathetically laughable. And yet these images of women influenced legislation and judgements because narrative gives scripts and roles to people to recreate in real life. Only by consciously exposing and deconstructing these roles and scripts would it be possible to live out something other than these prescripted, artificial and limiting roles.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Full post as published by Law & Humanities Blog on September 24, 2008 (boomark / email).