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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... hence, the ratification) of progress; the romantic Highlands are “not cultivated, not populous, not rational, not regulated—~above all, not extant.” Trumpener concedes that “political and cultural imperialism” exerts a decisive ...
... Hence, where Poovey makes the case for “evidence,” I turn my attention to “witnesses”; where she investigates “facts,” I examine “romance.” I do so, moreover, in a similarly reflexive way—that is, through a romantic account of romance ...
... Hence, while acknowledging the scholarly gains of the recent historicist enterprise, I suggest with Pittock that it has caused us to overlook one of the most important historical features of Highland Scotland: quite simply, its ...
... hence power whereas the humanities merely hemorrhage it. As Liu sees it, cultural studies of all stripes have thus become ciphers—ghosts—in a world of techno-logic that has assimilated, reshaped, and subsequently excreted them as so ...
... hence in the interpretation of texts. Foucault contends that this Enlightenmentdiscursive system, a veritable Borgesian maze, “still serves as the positive ground of our knowledge. . . ."17 In essence, Foucault attempts here a ...
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 |