Troubling confessions : speaking guilt in law & literature /

Brooks's book about stories--verbal narratives, talk with a purpose, criminal and other confessions--probes how confession as "a mode of discourse" is "capable of producing both the deepest truth and the most damaging untruth." The author marshals 47 legal cases, as well as autobiographies, novels, poems, films, and essays--a mountain of words he balances with Pascal: "Our linguistic instruments are too blunt ever to touch the truth." Stories--the opposing stories of prosecutor and defense attorney-- can mean life or death, can control sanity or insanity, guilt and exculpation. They are sometimes cris de coeur, sometimes exhibitionist. All is blended into a pattern and tradition of Western culture: literature, religious traditions, and psychotherapeutic culture suggest that "where confession is concerned, the law needs to recognize that its conceptions of human motivation and volition are particularly flawed, even perhaps something of a fiction." This is a dense, compact book, well worth reading in a world where the application of capital punishment and rule of law are in question while in the marketplace citizens vie to confess to everything imaginable. In detailing the history of confession and its integration into Western culture, Brooks has created a matrix by which individuals can better understand themselves and the legal system. All collections. ; Canisius College