Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature

Abstract

constant call to admit guilt amounts almost to a tyranny of confession today. We demand tell-all tales in public dramas of courtroom, talk shows and in print, as well as in more private spaces of confessional and psychoanalyst's office. Yet we are also deeply uneasy with concept: how can we tell whether a confession is true? What if it has been coerced? In Troubling Confessions, Peter Brooks juxtaposes cases from law and literature to explore kinds of truth we associate with confessions, and why we both rely on them and regard them with suspicion. For centuries law has considered confession to be the queen of proofs, yet it has also seen a need to regulate confessions and circumstances under which they are made, as evidenced in continuing speech a prime measure of authenticity, seeing it as an expression of selfhood that bears witness to personal truth. Yet urge to confess may be motivated by inextricable layers of shame, guilt, self-loathing, desire to propitiate figures of authority. Literature has often understood problematic nature of confession better than law, as Brooks demonstrates in perceptive readings of legal cases set against works by Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Joyce and Camus, among others. Mitya in The Brothers Karamazov captures trouble with confessional speech eloquently when he offers his confession with anguished plea: this is a confession; handle with care. By questioning truths of confession, Peter Brooks challenges us to reconsider how we demand confessions and what we do with them.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 120 citations exist upstream.