Rene Girard, Law, Literature, and Cinema: The Legal Drama of the Scapegoat
Rene Girard, Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, and the goat song of Tragoidia -- 'El sueno de la razon produce monstruos' or, 'the dream of reason creates monsters': Two little piggies went to the Apocalypse in William Golding's Lord of the Flies -- 'Does anybody know anything about the law?': White male grown-ups in the wilderness and their regression to the state of nature in James Dickey's Deliverance -- 'A little law and order wouldn't hurt anybody around here': The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and High Noon -- 'A woman only loves a real man': Metaphysical desire and the crisis of undifferentiation in Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Rashomon -- 'I just want to talk…': Liberalism, generative unanimity, and post-sacrificial scapegoating in 12 Angry Men -- 'You must always point...': The Post-Heroic Lawyer as scapegoat and scapegoater in Presumed Innocent, The Verdict, and Cape Fear -- The telling of lies and the casting of lots: Franz Kafka's The Trial and the eternal un-decidability of the scapegoat -- '…Why do we, all of us, have to keep judging and being judged?': The scapegoat and the scapegoater in Albert Camus' The Stranger and The Fall -- 'Out There': Monstrous doubles and the folie a deux in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood -- The Good Murderer Gary Gilmore: The re-sacralization of the scapegoat in the age of public reason -- Spare a Thought for the Hangman: The apocalypse of Rene Girard.