| “Taking Care” argues that literature and law reshaped themselves after the world wars by asking fundamental questions about how to take responsibility following accidental, unexpected death. The study explores how novels by Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf and Rebecca West make normative claims on their readers, encouraging them to imagine the world not as it is, but as it ought to be. These writers' transformations from impressionism and reflection to a more demanding normativity both replicate and alter concepts in law, and the dissertation examines these concepts in legal principles as well as in the rhetoric of legal cases. Rather than treating modernist novels as works in which psychological impressions are privileged and actions suspended, and contrasting this technique with legal decision, this study shows how law and literature pursue related visions of responsibility in dramatically different, even opposing ways. Their related visions suggest that responsibility has a sensibility, an underlying rhetorical, psychological and narrative structure that motivates both literature and law, but is shaped by them as well—and shaped, too, by a richer understanding of their relationship to each other.; The introduction presents Joseph Conrad's The Shadow Line as a model for literary responsibility, which emphasizes the necessary commitment of setting aside one's original ambitions in order to write the collective story of historical catastrophe. The first two chapters examine Virginia Woolf's novels Jacob's Room and Mrs. Dalloway as works that recast fundamental principles and categories of tort law, such as duty of care and stranger cases, in accounting for the traumatic injuries of the First World War. The third chapter considers property law in relation to Woolf's To the Lighthouse, exploring the process of inheriting the ordinary possessions of the dead. The last chapter turns from the legal principle to the legal event of the Nuremberg Trial, focusing on Rebecca West's journalism in order to ask how it is possible, through the instrument of a trial, to commit an event as unprecedented and extraordinary as Nuremberg to memory. |
