Eric M. Wilson - Böcker

This book attempts to link the entirety of James Ellroy’s work to major political trends, both historical and contemporary, in critical theory, as a unique, compelling deep-dive. Ellroy's crime fiction provides valuable insights into current trends of a disturbing, and possibly dangerous, nature. It analyzes the contestable political, social, and moral content of Ellroy’s writings through the interpretative lenses of established political and literary theorists—in this instance,Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Paul Virilio, Carl Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin. The text assumes the form of an exegesis on the subversive potentialities of Ellroy’s writings for what is understood as both the Left and the Right. But this formal exegesis is read against a second one that subliminally relates the critical interpretations of the first to certain difficult to articulate trends in the contemporary zeitgeist that have become even more pronounced following the U.S. federal election in November, 2024. It also implicitly suggests that traditional liberal democracy is ultimately incapable of resolving seemingly interminable political, social, and cultural crises within what is in essence a continental settler-colonial state. This book hopes to demonstrate the relevance of radical and cultural criminology to wider areas of contemporary political and cultural concern.

This book is the first monograph to critically evaluate the work of the literary scholar René Girard from the perspectives of Law and Literature and Law and Film Studies, two of the most multidisciplinary branches of critical legal theory. The central thesis is that Girard’s theory of the scapegoat mechanism provides a wholly new and original means of re-conceptualizing the nature of judicial modernity, which is the belief that modern Law constitutes an internally coherent and exclusively secular form of rationality. The book argues that it is the archaic scapegoat mechanism – the reconciliation of the community through the direction of unified violence against a single victim – that actually works best in explaining all of the outstanding issues of Law and Literature in both of its sub-forms: law-as-literature (the analysis of legal language and practice exemplified by literacy texts) and law-in-literature (the exploration of issues in legaltheory through the fictitious form of the novel). The book will provide readers with: (i) a useful introduction to the most important elements of the work of René Girard; (ii) a greater awareness of the ‘hidden’ nature of legal culture and reasoning within a post-secular age; and (iii) a new understanding of the ‘subversive’ (or ‘enlightening‘) nature of some of the most iconic works on Law in both Literature and Cinema, media which by their nature allow for the expression of truths repressed by formal legal discourse.