Scholarly Works, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures

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Browsing Scholarly Works, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures by Author "Johnson, Sharon P."

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  • Academy of Teaching Excellence CTE/Wine/Alumni Award dossier workshop
    Johnson, Sharon P. (2021-10-26)
    Workshop that presents best practices for the candidate and preparer of the dossier
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    Afterword
    Johnson, Sharon P. (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2019-12-18)
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    Consumption, Domesticity and the Female Body in Emile Zola’s Fiction [Book review]
    Johnson, Sharon P. (University of Nebraska, 2016-04-02)
    A book review of Hennessy, Susan S. Consumption, Domesticity and the Female Body in Emile Zola’s Fiction. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2015. Pp. 185. ISBN-13: 978-4955-0361-0
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    The Contrafatto Affair: Law, Judicial Risk, and Consent
    Johnson, Sharon P. (Sage, 2024-04-11)
    In Paris, France on October 15, 1827, 28-year old Sicilian priest Joseph Contrafatto was sentenced for raping 5-year old Hortense Le Bon. This article frames the rhetorical strategies of the prosecution and defense using Robert Cover’s notion of judicial innovation, developed in his Justice Accused. Both sides based their arguments on articles 331 and 332 of the Criminal code. The Contrafatto Affair was an extraordinary case for rape legislation; it was among the first if not the first trial in France when a perpetrator of attentat à la pudeur avec violence (violent, indecent assault), was sentenced and found guilty when the prosecution used the argument of la violence morale (a type of coercion or abuse of an individual’s trust or naivety) when the victim suffered no physical signs of violence. Later, la violence morale and the requirement of consent became constitutive parts of the rape statutes by 1853 (for children) and 1857 (for adults), which this article develops through contextualizing law, rhetoric, and interpretation. The background of the trial provides an overview of certain procedures and protocols of 19th-century France. An examination of the jurisprudence related to attentat à la pudeur sans violence (non-violent, indecent assault, art. 331), attentat à la pudeur avec violence and la violence morale will highlight how forward-looking and risky the prosecution’s arguments were in his interpretation of article 332.
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    La Loi, les narrations juridiques et la Violence : Le Procès du Prêtre Contrafatto
    Johnson, Sharon P. (2021-06-01)
    Law through narrative seeks to maintain a world of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful of valid and void. Violence in the case of Contrafatto represents not only the violent acts he committed, but the ramifications of legal acts: interpretations in law constitute justifications for violence which has already occurred or which is about to occur. Contrafatto’s crime and 1827 trial underscore these concomitant themes. This paper analyzes the rhetorical strategies used by the prosecution and the defense. For the prosecution, the 5-year old Hortense LeBon’s painful, “naïve” account respire la vérité in all of its “sincerity.” Her attorney argues that she is a victim of des attentes à la pudeur avec violence, having suffered physical violence and “de la violence morale.” The King’s attorney adeptly introduces the idea that a lack of consent represents violence, intertwining law with morality. These positions challenge the traditional interpretations of the Penal Code’s Articles 331 and 332 on rape. Law restores order through narrative. The prosecution questioned a narrow judicial understanding of how Article 332 defined violence on a child younger than 13. This is a perfect example of moral and legal innovation that Robert Cover advances in Justice Accused. Hence, the law did not inflict additional violence to Hortense le Bon by exculpating her rapist. Contrafatto was found guilty of rape and sentenced to a life of hard labor (Travaux à Perpétuité), a justified end to his freedom.
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    Le Code en toutes lettres: Écritures et réécritures du Code Civil au XIXe siècle [Book review]
    Johnson, Sharon P. (American Association of Teachers of French, 2021)
    A book review of MAS, MARION et FRANÇOIS KERLOUÉGAN, éd. Le Code en toutes lettres: Écritures et réécritures du Code Civil au XIXe siècle. Classiques Garnier, 2020. ISBN 978-2-406-10046-1. Pp. 309.
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    Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France [Book review]
    Johnson, Sharon P. (2016-10-01)
    A book review of Andrea Goulet, Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. viii + 295 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 U.S. (cl). ISBN 978-0-8122-4779-4.
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    L’Affaire Contrafatto: Law and Narrative
    Johnson, Sharon P. (2021)
    On October 15 1827, a 28-year old priest, Joseph Contrafatto, was sentenced for raping five-year old Hortense Le Bon. My article analyses the trial of this cause célèbre, especially the rhetorical strategies used by the prosecution and defense. This is the first study that interprets Contrafatto’s 58-page trial within Robert Cover’s legal framework. Applying Cover’s analyses of “innovative legal arguments” to the Contrafatto case illuminates how the prosecution’s closing arguments were the precursor to new legal definitions of especially article 332 of the Code Pénal. Moreover, omissions and unclear language in the Code contributed to judges and lawyers’ ability to modify rape penal code over time. French jurisprudence would come to include la violence morale (a type of coercion or abuse of an individual’s trust or naivety) and the requirement of consent as constitutive parts of the rape statues concerning children and adults in 1857. This paper considers how narrative shapes law to reflect social mores. For Cover, when a dynamic model of law and judicial processes occur, legal statutes are not static; they are always “becoming” (6). Contrafatto’s trial, analyzed within the context of 19th-century rape penal law, laid the foundation for the evolution of France’s 1810 Penal Code as differing interpretations and social understandings of rape entered into French jurisprudence throughout the century.
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    The Medical Gaze of Rape: Pedagogy, Power, and Blindness
    Johnson, Sharon P. (2021-10-30)
    Luce Irigaray asks in Speculum de l’autre femme “What if the ‘object’ started to speak? Which also means beginning to ‘see,’ etc. What disaggregation of the subject would that entail?” (135). Irigaray’s question elucidates the theoretical framework of this paper when analyzing eight medical reports (1836-1893) that represent an essential, unstudied source for documenting the crime of rape as they furnish important definitions and statistics about viol, attentats à la pudeur or attentats aux moeurs. In his Human Remains, Jonathan Strauss demonstrates that from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries, medicine gained unprecedented credibility as a discipline. It redefined and asserted its legitimacy in respect to other institutions, notably the courts and the church, while its theories and approaches gained a broader truth-value, extending their reach beyond the domain of health to issues of fundamental social interest (6). Those reports’ facts and narrativization contributed to an already booming field accumulating data on other crimes and criminal acts. Moreover, those reports pedagogically (in)formed contemporary and future practicing doctors with a protocol for reading and presenting evidence of violated bodies to magistrates and presiding judges who determined whether a rape had occurred or not. While analyzing the efforts to narrate rape what remains absent are the patients’ voices and points of view. What if the object began to speak? Certainly, she would articulate a resistance to the method, the medicalization of her body and the practice’s blindness to women’s truths about the violence they have lived.
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    Sexual Crime, Religion and Masculinity in fin-de-siècle France: The Flamidien Affair [Book review]
    Johnson, Sharon P. (Oxford University Press, 2019-04-19)
    A book review of Sexual Crime, Religion and Masculinity in fin-de-siècle France: The Flamidien Affair. By Timothy Verhoeven. (Palgrave Pivot.) Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 122 pp.