“I have never been to Japan,” says the Japanophile Arnold Taads in Cees Nooteboom’s novel Rituals. “Modern Japan is vulgar. lt was made diseased by us. It would destroy my dream to go there.” Most Western writing which purports to be about Japan is not about Japan, but the dream, the idea, of Japan. To a remarkable and unique extent, the Western dream—which has occasionally been a nightmare—of Japan has been absorbed by the Japanese, so that the dream and the reality are not at all distinct. In the context of such a dynamic cultural exchange, such texts as treaties take on enormous importance. None of these is more significant than the Treaty of Friendship forced on the Japanese Shogunate in 1854 by Commodore Matthew Perry, and the subsequent commercial treaty negotiated by Townsend Harris, the first American consul to Japan. These two texts may be seen as containing all the seeds of modern Japan and its “economic miracle,” though they were intended to impose Western will and desire on the nation that had been sealed off from the rest of the world for two and a half centuries. A treaty is a speech act with both constative and performative aspects, whose performatives have a constative aspect and vice-versa. It is supposed to state an agreement between two or more nations, but also encodes disagreement, states and enacts (or attempts to enact by stating) dominance and submission. It tries, that is, to preserve through language a Static relation of power between the parties to it. And yet like any literary text, it can only state the impossibility of any static relation, and necessarily invokes all the resources of interpretative and creative response which the parties to it may have at their disposal. The Harris and Perry treaties are supposed (even by the Japanese themselves) to have humiliated Japan, but in fact they provided a narrative paradigm for its transformation into the world power which it is today, thanks to certain radical strategies of reading which Japan had learned from Buddhism, which allowed it to absorb the Western texts, along with the “desires” they purported to represent and enact, while rendering them thoroughly Japanese.

Recent cultural studies have gone into different issues like processes of legitimation, institutionalization and professionalization of culture. However, the relationship between legal and cultural studies in a post-colonial discursive context is seldom discussed. The legal system, potentially regulating all social and personal actions, must be regarded as the most powerful cultural institution and thus the most potent instrument of cultural control—in contemporary society. This paper will use Hong Kong, a British colony, as an example to see how the legal system may selectively legitimate the cultural production of Hong Kong, making it seem hybridized, but actually not free from the gaze of “Englishness.” The common law system of Hong Kong upholds different legal procedures that marginalize indigenous moral values, shape local class relation and thus significantly limit the space of cultural production. To conceive the problem of post/colonialism from between legal and cultural discourse can contribute to a better understanding of the field of Hong Kong cultural production. By going into the complicity between legal and cultural colonialism, this paper tries to let the (im)possibility of the articulation of the discourse of the cultural Other present itself, and hence establish new discursive space to point towards cultural/legal justice otherwise.

Law is a specialized intellectual systern and a speciai social system. But lying beyond such systems is the human substance of suffering, desire, and compassion. Literature may move us with its insights into the personal life hidden behind the abstract theory and the impersonal procedures of law. This comparative study of four short stories explores how the literary ari draws forth our poignant encounter with the humanity underlying law. This raises questions for the philosophy of law as weil focuses attention upon aesthetic powers. The works studied are by Louis Auchincloss (United States), Margaret Atwood (Canada, writing in English), Franz Kafka (Czechoslovakia, writing in German), and Graham Greene (England).

This essay studies the nature and function of authorship from the perspective of legal discourse, focusing on how copyright law defines qualifications for authorship. Here i also discuss the provisions of copyright law, including the justification for originality, the distribution and reproduction of books, along with the laws which regulate these systems, and the qualifications for copyright protection. In addition, I examine how copyright law, in cooperation with the culture industry, materializes and reifies intellectual property as a commodity in the marketplace. These perspectives lead to an examination of the question of whether or not the copyright law does, in fact—as opposed to in theory—serve to protect traditional authorship in order to maintain commercial and material benefits for publishers or entrepreneurs.

The first part of this essay lays out the literary debates on Ezra Pound's politics. Literary critics regard Pound’s fascism as the signatory act of collusion between modernist poetics and right-wing politics. Charles Bernstein, for instance, typifies the harsh criticism that justifying Pound’s fascism is justifying fascism. I argue for historicizing Pound's ideas of fascism, a mixture of guild socialism and social credit theory, which does not fall into easy categories of either left or right. Furthermore, in the true libertarian spirit, defending Pound's right of anti-Semitic speech does not necessarily mean that one has to agree with his politics. We should exclude the issue of anti-Semitism from Pound's treason case. Examing the legal aspect of the treason charge against Pound in light of the United States Constitution and relevant precedents reveals that because the treason charge requires both an overt act of either “levying war” against the government of “adhering” and “giving aid and comfort” to the enemies, and the intent of betraying one’s country, Pound's radio speeches, do not show sufficient evidence that Pound intended to betray his country. The treason charge against Pound was insufficiently founded. Based on both the intent of the Constitution’s framers. and the judicial precedents, Pound should have been acquitted of treason.

This essay discusses the relation of ethics and aesthetics, or of natural law and poetry. It confronts two opposing recent interpretations of the philosophical poem On the Nature of Things, written by the Roman poet Lucretius: Martha Nussbaum’ s ethical reading, as opposed to the aesthetical interpretation of Lucretius which I have elaborated. Nussbaum claims that knowledge derived from literature, such as Lucretius’ poetry, can supply the basis for a neo-Aristotelian natural law theory. She maintains that Lucretius propagates the ideal of mutual affection in a calm married life, cautioning against the dangers of romantic love. However, Nussbaum’s interpretation is based on a one-dimensional reading that neglects the ambiguity in the content of Lucretius’ poetry as well as the ambiguous relation between its philosophical content and its poetic style. More generally, literature is by nature much too ambiguous to serve as a basis for ethics. Art has other purposes than showing the Good. Even if the modernist stress on the autonomy of art is considered one-sided, the moralistic view of art seems less adequate than the romantic one which holds that art mirrors the tragic, imperfect character of life in all its ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aspects.

This paper explores the relationship between law and the Grimms’ folk tales. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were orlginally students of Roman law, but later they took an interest in medieval German language and literature. However, they still applied the philological method of the historical school of jurisprudence to their researches. For the Grimms, poetry and law were closely linked in ancient German thought: ancient literary texts are all discussions about legal questions (robbery, murder, dispute, canniballsm, child abuse, etc.) Several critics have pointed out that the endings of the Grimms’ tales are related to a certain form of severe punishment which corresponds to the crime the villain has committed earlier In the story. It seems that, in tribal society. Oral tales (which were carriers of legal messages) functioned as precedents. In this paper I argue that at the beginning Jacob regarded Children’s and Household Tales as the relics of ancient legal discourses (Germanic common law) and ancient German literature. He and Wilhelm attempted to construct upon this basis a national identity of the German people to resist the political and cultural threats from France. But, with-a long history of transformation (nearly fifty years), the tales underwent a continual process of rewriting, omitting, and revising until it became a proper tool for cultivating good moral sense and establishing the authority of law.

Witchcraft manifests a threat to Christian civilization. Historically the fear of witchcraft together with socio-economic forces produces different perspectives on social intergration and offects witch-hunting activities. Authority is seen in legal documents, and historical witch persecutions echo witch-hunting in literary works. Theories of the persecution of witchcraft can be divided into two groups: 1) the scapegoat theory, based on the conflicts created because of a new regime, 2) social strain theory emphasizing tensions produced by social and economic changes. This paper tries to discuss historiography of witch- hunting as represented in The Witch of Edmonton and Vinegar Tom, with an emphasis on the punishment of deviant women in the early seventeenth century.

This article seeks to dwell on the challenges faced by scholars in interpreting “Shakespeare’s plays” by looking into the complicated relationships between playwriting and authorship in Shakespeare’s time. Many scholars of today, it seems to me, tend to hold on to some misleading assumptions about the theatrical conditions and play publication in Shakespeare's time. Accordingly, they tend to ignore the impact produced by such factors as collaboration, script ownership, censorship, and textual variations as well as their influences on the problem of dramatic authorship. Using Robert Hapgood’s Shakespeare the Theatre-Poet as my starting point, I shall examine and explore these aspects mentioned above, and rethink the views of “the original plays by single authorship” upheld by him. I shall also touch upon the impact of post-structuralism upon the authorship of “Shakespeare's plays” and the interpretations of these plays. In my view, although Roland Barthes has proclaimd “the death of the author,” to most readers, including Hapgood, “Shakespeare” remains present in “his” plays. Nevertheless, this “presence-in-absence” is a textualized presence. By no means does it suggest an essentialized presence. And yet, to most Shakespearean scholars, once breaking away from the authorial intention and the ultimate meaning of a work, how to re-explore the issues created by reading and interpretation means at once opportunities and challenges.

After her eloquent delineation of “the quality of mercy” failed to persuade Shylock to be lenient on Antonio’s breach of contract, Portia went along with him by handling the case strictly by the letter of the law. Shylock’s eventual defeat was caused by his own insistence on the justice of harsh legalism; but if Shylock had opted for leniency could it be called, “justice served?” Would the Chiristian majority have lessened the moral outrage and the racial discrimination against Shylock? Although she won the legal battle with Shylock, both he and she were moral victims—Shylock as a member of the Jewish minority, and Portia as a maiden and thus regarded as not intelligent enough to choose her own husband, and not fit to serve in the legal profession.