Reading The Law Made Strange: A Theological Jurisprudence of Popular Culture

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Primary Supervisor

MacNeil, William

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Tranter, Kieran

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2014
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Abstract

This thesis elaborates and performs a form of cultural legal studies that examines the overlap between legal theory, theology and popular culture. In doing so it makes use of, and mobilises, the concept of estrangement or ‘making’ strange put forward by Victor Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists (amongst others). It does this at two levels: first, by examining the genres of speculative fiction as genres of estrangement that ‘make strange’ their representations of law, legality and justice; and second, by proposing a mode and methodology of cultural legal reading as one that itself ‘makes strange’, rendering the texts under analysis otherwise. As such, it sees in the stories told within the genres of speculative fiction not simply flights of fancy or postulates of pure imagination with no relation or reference to reality. Rather, they produce a meditation on and mediation of the world itself—one that opens us to see the world both in its createdness and contingency, as storied and imbued with meaning. It is for this reason that I turn to speculative fiction in relation to a mode of the cultural legal. Rather than focusing on the direct representations of law, legal institutions and legal actors within popular culture, the engagement of speculative fiction provides a way to understand and re-think the stories of and about law themselves. In the analysis of motifs of law and legality, of justice, authority and legitimacy that are ‘made strange’ by their situation in worlds imagined differently, we find the potential to think and see them otherwise, not in the sense of simply a utopian (or dystopian) looking forward through the potential of the imagination, but an understanding of the imagination’s setting free of these concepts enabling a different reflection and understanding of them.

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Thesis (PhD Doctorate)

Degree Program

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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Griffith Law School

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The author owns the copyright in this thesis, unless stated otherwise.

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Public

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Subject

Russian formalists

Shklovskiĭ, Viktor, 1893-1984.

Legal theory

Theology

Popular culture

Theological jurisprudence

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