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2 books match the query 'Brooks, Peter'
Thinking in Cases
Fiction, Law, and the Case HistoryPeter Brooks
University of Chicago Press, 2027
How the form of the case history became an important way of studying the individual as an exemplary case in medicine, psychoanalysis, law, and the novel.
What does it mean when we address ourselves to a specific problem and treat it as a “case” that needs resolution, a resolution that may in turn offer us more general lessons? The “case history” has become a central form of thought and analysis in our culture, but rarely has it been studied on its own. In Thinking in Cases, the distinguished critic Peter Brooks zeroes in on a kind of thinking that we all know—and often use—without understanding its dimensions and its history.
This book ponders what we do and mean when we think in cases—when we take up specific instances with a view to making them exemplary. Brooks brings to this study decades of reflection on the psychoanalytic case history, on the rhetoric of the legal case, and on novels that unfold as cases seeking solutions. Brooks focuses on the case-history’s emergence in the late nineteenth century: first, he examines how Henry James’s uses of narrative parallel case-study methods in law, medicine, and psychoanalysis. Elsewhere, he traces the case history from Hippocratic medicine through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fiction to a startling legal case from Victorian England involving shipwreck and cannibalism. Other chapters discuss a tale of madness by Balzac and Freud’s most speculative works, especially Moses and Monotheism. A final chapter examines recent novels—Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Coetzee’s Disgrace, Modiano’s Dora Bruder, and Erpenbeck’s Kairos—as case studies.
Troubling Confessions
Speaking Guilt in Law and LiteraturePeter Brooks
University of Chicago Press, 2000
In Troubling Confessions, Peter Brooks juxtaposes cases from law and literature to explore the kinds of truth we associate with confessions, and why we both rely on them and regard them with suspicion. For centuries the law has considered confession to be "the queen of proofs," yet it has also seen a need to regulate confessions and the circumstances under which they are made, as evidenced in the continuing debate over the Miranda decision. Western culture has made confessional speech a prime measure of authenticity, seeing it as an expression of selfhood that bears witness to personal truth. Yet the urge to confess may be motivated by inextricable layers of shame, guilt, self-loathing, the desire to propitiate figures of authority. Literature has often understood the problematic nature of confession better than the law, as Brooks demonstrates in perceptive readings of legal cases set against works by Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Joyce, and Camus, among others.
Mitya in The Brothers Karamazov captures the trouble with confessional speech eloquently when he offers his confession with the anguished plea: this is a confession; handle with care. By questioning the truths of confession, Peter Brooks challenges us to reconsider how we demand confessions and what we do with them.