Reading <i>Poethics</i>

The advent of law-and-literature scholarship, or at least the pronouncement of Law and Literature as a major new scholarly enterprise, reflects a general tendency in our culture to look to literature as a source of spiritual renewal, as a means of reclaiming a vaguely defined but emotionally evocative legacy. Such a turn to literature for renewal is ironic, since, as Richard Poirier points out, it is literature itself whose internal troubles seem to best reflect the various types of alienation, malaise, and disbelief which are said to distress modern culture. In that regard, it may be more appropriate to look to literature as a model of postmodernist confusion than as a cure for it.