Abstract

Will the wounds of the law and literature movement commit interdisciplinary scholarship to certain death? The question might seem unduly alarmist given the scope of Americanists’ work of late, but it is a question that Julie Stone Peters in PMLA’s “State of the Profession” encourages scholars to ask, and it is a question meant to provoke examination of the political and psychosocial investments in interdisciplinary work. Peters plumbs the mind of the law and literature movement and finds it sheltering a “secret interior wound” (448); far from clandestine, however, in the story she tells, the law and literature alliance plots its academic claims with near criminal intent. Literary scholars, lamenting the insignificance of their own fields of study, look to law as an “an exceptional intersection of textuality and social power” (446). Legal scholars, hurrying to humanize law, embrace literature as a challenge to “originalist and textualist theories of interpretation” (448). Each offers what the other lacks: literature, “its inability to achieve some ever-imagined but ever-receding praxis; law [its] wounded sense of estrangement from a kind of critical humanism that might stand up to the bureaucratic state apparatus” (448). Sadly, neither discipline can ever achieve its aim; the “splitting and transfer of disciplinary desire” (449), Peters’s argues, reproduces the very separate spheres that it claims to unravel. Each discipline becomes a caricature of itself with literature the humane friend to law’s “utilitarian calculus”; ultimately, for Peters, this imperfect union of compensatory desires invites us to question the logical possibility of interdisciplinary work itself (449). Peters’s lament is only one of the more recent metacommentaries on the state of legal and literary studies, which endlessly delights in narratives of its development and, alas, dissolution.