Reimagining To Kill a Mockingbird
Penulis
: Austin Sarat and Martha Merrill Umphrey
Subyek
: Law in literature
Penerbit
: University of Massachusetts Press
Ringkasan :The year 2012 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the release of To Kill a
Mockingbird, the film remake of Harper Lee’s acclaimed novel.1 In taking
note of that milestone, this volume looks at the film, a classic and
canonical text in legal scholarship, with fresh eyes. The chapters that follow
revisit and examine Atticus, Scout, and Jem Finch, their community,
and the events that occur there through the interdisciplinary prism of law
and humanities scholarship—work that brings a distinctive interpretive
framework to the study of law.
The film and novel are of course widely available and have taken on
both a mythical and a pedagogical role in American culture (and beyond).
Earnest teachers have for generations urged schoolchildren to understand
Atticus Finch’s defense of Tom Robinson as a linchpin moment in the nation’s
narrative of racial progress. Indeed on one standard reading, To Kill
a Mockingbird is a profoundly pedagogical text, one that strives to teach us
ways of overcoming prejudice and to live with one another in a better and
more just world. That rendering of the film situates it in a past moment
that has been overcome, and conjures Atticus Finch as a hero who, while
failing in the narrative space of the film, nevertheless paves a path to a
better future through his work and his children.The readings of the film offered in this volume complicate without fully
rejecting that mythologizing interpretation. They peel back the film’s visual
representation of Maycomb, Alabama’s many-layered social world,
offering sometimes counterintuitive rereadings through the prism of number of provocative contemporary theoretical and interpretive questions.
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