'The Law Is Just Words After All': Torture, Truth, and Language in the Post-9/11 US and Percival Everett's The Water Cure

Autor: Wendy Mcmahon
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: MFS Modern Fiction Studies. 66:499-526
ISSN: 1080-658X
DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2020.0023
Popis: Through a reading of Percival Everett's experimental novel, The Water Cure, this essay argues for the need to interrogate the law as literature and language if we are to understand the moral permissibility of torture in the changed cultural and political understandings of war since 9/11. Working from the premise that the law and literature, through language and narrative, create social worlds and are worldmaking, this essay analyzes what happens to the law and narrative when the law writes torture into being. When confronted with the practice of torture, the novel ceases to be worldmaking and instead enacts the world unmade.
Databáze: OpenAIRE