Scholarly Works, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures

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Browsing Scholarly Works, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures by Content Type "Conference proceeding"

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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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  • Louise Michel and "Le Symbole"
    Shryock, Richard L. (2022-11-03)
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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.