Thomas Giddens @ThomGiddens on Comics and Legal Aesthetics: Multimodality and the Haunted Mask of Knowing (Routledge, 2017)

Routledge is publishing a wealth of really interesting books in the area of law and the humanities this year and next. Here's another.

Thomas Giddens, St. Mary's University, is publishing On Comics and Legal Aesthetics: Multimodality and the Haunted Mask of Knowing (2017) (due next summer or autumn). Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

Law brings certainty to life. Its production of and reliance upon rational text as the predominant way of knowing about, and thus judicially managing, the world enables law to give practical and certain answers to difficult and complex moral, judicial and philosophical questions. But law’s conscious ‘certainty’ involves the denial of alternative ways of knowing, and a repression of the aesthetic and the visual within dominant forms of legal knowledge. Tapping into the recent ‘turn’ towards literary, cultural and visual concerns in legal studies, this book examines the critical value that comics can bring to law. Situated in-between the rational, textual, aesthetic and the visual, comics are, this book demonstrates, uniquely able to explore the limits of the legal text; and, in expanding legal discourse, to offer new ways of figuring the future of law.