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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... specter haunts the revolutionary imagination: the phantom of production. Everywhere it sustains an unbridled romanticism” in the service of a generalized humanism—the notion that one must not “be” as much as “produce” oneself.14 ...
... specter, then what recourse is left to us if we wish to recover it? How is one to tell the truth about experience? If experience is implicitly opposed to discourse, or if discourse reanimates experience as a specter, then how is one to ...
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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 |