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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... natural history, philology, and political economics—instituted discourses which in turn mediated human understanding of the objects of its inquiry. They did so even while promoting the illusion of a direct contact with these objects ...
... natural history encountered the discourse of evolution) , knowledge became ever more implicated in language, and hence in the interpretation of texts. Foucault contends that this Enlightenmentdiscursive system, a veritable Borgesian ...
... natural history, philology, political econom~ ics, and so on), that we confront the “real” edges of our “symbolic,” discursive being. “Literature” here is the same thing as Womack's “romance”: it designates discourse severed from the ...
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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 |