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Law and Trauma in the Work of Art Spiegelman

Posted: 23 Apr 2013 08:03 AM PDT

Karen Crawley, Griffith Law School, and Honni Van Rijswijk, University of Technology, Sydney, have published Justice in the Gutter: Representing Everyday Trauma in the Graphic Novels of Art Spiegelman. Here is the abstract.

Scholars working at the intersection of law and trauma have often turned to literature to supplement the law's version of justice. In this article, we consider what the unique formal properties of comics – which we refer to here as graphic novels – might bring to this pursuit, by reference to Art Spiegelman's Maus (1996) and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). We suggest that these two works offer a critique of the underlying model of trauma upon which law relies, suggesting alternative understandings of trauma in a mode which is particularly instructive for law.

Although Spiegelman organizes his treatment of trauma through specific events that have defined the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – the Holocaust and 9/11 – he represents the impact, as well as the ethical and aesthetic questions of these experiences, in ways that radically challenge the supremacy of the event by showing the ways in which the event fails to be contained.Download the full text of the paper from SSRN at the link.

Dr. Seuss and Children's Rights

Posted: 23 Apr 2013 07:59 AM PDT

Jonathan Todres, Georgia State University College of Law and Sarah Higinbotham, Georgia State University, have published A Person's a Person: Children's Rights in Children's Literature. Here is the abstract.

Although the Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history, children's rights are still seen in many circles as novel and quaint ideas but not serious legal theory. The reality, however, is that the realization of children's rights is vital not only for childhood but for individuals' entire lives. Similarly, although the books children read and have read to them are a central part of their childhood experience, so too has children's literature been ignored as a rights-bearing discourse and a means of civic socialization. We argue that children's literature, like all narratives that contribute to our moral sense of the world, help children construct social expectations and frame an understanding of their own specific rights and responsibilities. Arguing that literature is a source of law for children, we explore children's literature with a view to examining what children learn about their own rights, the rights of others, and the role of rights more broadly in a democratic society. Using Dr. Seuss as a test case, this Article explores the role of children's literature in children's rights discourses. This Article also examines recent empirical work on the benefits of human rights education, connecting that research with law and literature perspectives. Ultimately, this Article aims to connect and build upon the fields of children's rights law, law and literature, children's literature criticism, human rights, and cultural studies to forge a new multidisciplinary sub-field of study: children's rights and children's literature.

The full text is not available from SSRN.