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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... narrative-—Barbara Shapiro's impressive study A Culture ofFaet (2000) presented a different take on the “facts” in question—Poovey's book was certainly one of the most lucid commentaries on the culture of historicism. It focused on the ...
... narrative here), making specters of seemingly material things. If, as Bill Brown puts it, “things” appeal to us, it is “because they lie both at hand and somewhere outside the theoretical field, beyond a certain limit, as a recognizable ...
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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 |