Citation and Precedent

Thomas O. Beebee is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and German, Penn State University, USA. He is the author of Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492-2002 (2008), Epistolary Fiction in Europe (1999), The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (1994) and Clarissa on the Continent: Translation and Seduction (1990). He is the Editor of the journal Comparative Literature Studies.

• Acknowledgments1.1 Introduction 1.2 Subsystem or Public Sphere? 2.1 In Search of the Invisible Precedent: Grimm Writes to Savigny 2.2 Kant, Codification, and Goethe's Elective Affinities 3.1 A Recursive Process: Kafka's Law - and Ours 3.2 Walter Benjamin reads the Weimar Constitution 3.3 From Schiller to Schund: Zensur and the Canonization of Literature 3.4 German Literature Fights for its Rights: A Thick Description of an Incident of Weimar Literary Culture 4.1 Carl Schmitt and/as Benito Cereno 4.2 Citation as Second-Order Observation: Peter Weiss's The InvestigationConclusionWorks Cited

"Kafka, Benjamin, Schmitt—that German-speaking writers and thinkers of the early 20th century are obsessed with 'the law' is well-known. Citation and Precedent widens our historical and conceptual perspective. Beebee reconstructs not only a dense intertextual network of law, literature, and philosophy that pervades German culture from Kant to Peter Weiss; he also shows that these crossings and borrowings are driven by the dream, or the nightmare, of a 'culture' capable of uniting law and life, codified norm and everyday reality. This is an excellent book." -- Andreas Gailus, Associate Professor of German, University of Michigan, USA