The Ruins of Experience: Scotland's "Romantick" Highlands and the Birth of the Modern WitnessThere emerged, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, a reflexive relationship between shifting codes of legal evidence in British courtrooms and the growing fascination throughout Europe with the "primitive" Scottish Highlands. New methods for determining evidential truth, linked with the growing prominence of lawyers and a formalized division of labor between witnesses and jurors, combined to devalue the authority of witness testimony, magnifying the rupture between experience and knowledge. Juries now pronounced verdicts based not upon the certainty of direct experience but rather upon abstractions of probability or reasonable likelihood. |
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... Enlightenment. For another, it seems inherently con— tradictory to accord spirit substance, or to acknowledge “[h]aunting [as] a constituent element of modern social life.”2 Nevertheless, a world of “post-”s (e.g., postmodernism ...
... Enlightenment thought, and specifically to the historical emergence of the disciplines during the eighteenth century. These disciplines—notably natural history, philology, and political economics—instituted discourses which in turn ...
... Enlightenment Highlands as an exemplary site for reflecting on the spectral allure of experience in modernity. This allure, and the romantic Highlands themselves, emerges, we will see, from the rupture—institutional and epistemological ...
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Contents
Experience and the Allure of the Improbable | 1 |
STRUCTURE | 21 |
FEELING | 109 |
Notes | 199 |
225 | |
241 | |
Acknowledgments | 251 |
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The Ruins of Experience: Scotland's "Romantick" Highlands and the Birth of ... Matthew Wickman No preview available - 2007 |