Frohock on Reading Lolita as a Sentencing Memorandum @frohock_c @AlbanyLawReview @MiamiLawSchool @umlawschool

Christina Frohock, University of Miami School of Law, is publishing Legal Fiction: Reading Lolita as a Sentencing Memorandum in volume 86 of the Albany Law Review. Here is the abstract.

The idea of a legal narrative often focuses on identifying a narrative within the law, for example, the persuasive power of storytelling in a trial court motion or an appellate brief. The story emerges from the law. This Article proposes inverting that focus so that we identify the law within a narrative. Using the example of Vladimir Nabokov’s classic novel Lolita, the Article explains how we can read the novel as a prolonged sentencing memorandum. That memorandum casts the infamous first-person narrator, recounting his crimes under the pseudonym of Humbert Humbert, as a defendant writing pro se. In Lolita, the law emerges from the story, showing that an entire legal document may be redrawn as a narrative. The legal document and the narrative are one, with a distinct point of view in favor of the criminal defendant. This unity between law and narrative illuminates a deep, essential goal shared by both genres: garnering sympathy. The notion of law without sympathy thus rings hollow. Finally, this essential link between law and sympathy shines a new light on the law’s role to promote justice. Justice must be measured at least partly as an expression of sympathy rather than solely as a cold calculation of costs and benefits.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Nabokov @ArsScripta @FrankPasquale @NPR

Over at NPR, Danielle Kurtzleben has an interesting discussion of Donald Trump as a "unreliable narrator," asking whether he resembles Nabokov as a writer and offering us an explanation of why his Twitter feed fascinates us so much (well, apart from the part that he sits in the Oval Office, at least for now). She quotes Wayne C. Booth, the creator of the term "unreliable narrator" as writing, "All of the great uses of unreliable narration depend for their success on far more subtle effects than merely flattering the reader or making him work. Whenever an author conveys to his reader an unspoken point, he creates a sense of collusion against all, those, whether in the story or out of it, who do not get that point."

What point or points is Trump making and to whom? Commentators have already spilled a lot of ink and spent a lot of tv time opining on this issue. Who is his audience? Is he persuading anyone? Or is that even his purpose? Is he constructing an alternate reality, or presenting the reality that at least a substantial minority of the US public agrees exists?

BTW, Wayne C. Booth is just about my favorite literary theorist. His books, The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Rhetoric of Irony, are just amazing.


Via @ArsScripta, @FrankPasquale.