Abstract
This chapter forms the introduction to part II of this volume. The depiction of science and technology has fascinated literary writers for centuries, from ancient Greek tragedy to contemporary literature. If technology and literature share a long history, so do law and literature as the two strands of Law and Literature, ‘law as literature’ and ‘law in literature’ show. The combined interest in law, literature and technology in part II, then, has its focus on questions pertaining to the topic of code, both as constraint and option.
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- 1.
The professor assures the author that ‘he had emptied the whole vocabulary in his frame, and made the strictest computation of the general proposition there is in books between the number of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of speech’ Swift (1977: 229).
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For an overview of ‘Landmarks in Fictive Images of Technology’, see Chandler (1995); Chandler’s main focus being on science fiction, with utopian views on societal dependence on artificial intelligence in the form of robots etc., it is only fair to note here Henry James’s early contribution to narratives of decoding and surveillance, the short story ‘In the Cage’ (2005, orig. 1919), and Ri Tokko’s (pseudonym of Ludwig Dexheimer) Das Automatenzeitalter (2004, orig. 1930).
- 3.
An early example of such influence can be seen in the way in which the body-oriented sciences such as craniology, physiognomy and phrenology, all based on the idea that the human body is itself a code that, when read well, provides valuable information, together culminated in criminal anthropology. As introduced and developed by Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) it has as its central tenet the claim that a person’s character and disposition as well as features such as inborn criminality can be judged from the face and the outward appearance of his bodily characteristics, and that, subsequently, a person’s acts are determined (Gaakeer 2005).
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Gaakeer, J. (2013). Prefatory Remarks on Part II: Law and Literature. In: Hildebrandt, M., Gaakeer, J. (eds) Human Law and Computer Law: Comparative Perspectives. Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6314-2_6
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