Weiner on Talking Animals and the Internationalist Liberal Imagination: The Case of E.B. White @MarkSWeiner

Mark S. Weiner,  Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School, has published Talking Animals and the Internationalist Liberal Imagination: The Case of E.B.White, at 2019 Juridisk Publikation 95. Here is the abstract.

This essay considers the significance of the literary representation of talking animals for the legal ideals of midcentury liberal internationalism. Its purpose is to contribute to the cultural history of international law. It does so by reflecting on the conceptual and aesthetic links between the American author E. B. White’s classic children’s stories Stuart Little (1945) and Charlotte’s Web (1952) and his analysis of: 1) the rules of English prose, in the treatise The Elements of Style (1959), and 2) the establishment of the United Nations, about which he wrote extensively. The method of the essay is that of literary analysis, which examines an author’s use of and approach to language. In White’s view, good English style and sustainable international order both depended on the creation of “hard” rules enforceable, respectively, through critical literary judgment and global legal institutions. White’s contemporaneous depiction of anthropomorphic animal speech invites readers to imagine a humankind that has transcended the particularity of nationalism—a global civilization to be forged through the application of critical reading practices within a rules-based international order. 

Download the article at the link.