Against Method 77

133. I am relying here upon the insights emerging from the field of“ethical criticism,” best exemplified by such writers as Wayne C. Booth , The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley : University of California Press , 1988), and Martha Nussbaum , Love's Knowledge: Essays On Philosophy and Literature(Oxford : Oxford University Press , 1990) and Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life(Boston : Beacon Press , 1995). Most especially, I owe a deep debt to the thought of James Boyd White , whose portrayal of law and judging as forms of rhetoric and ways of speaking open a path toward an approach to legal criticism that is rigorous and exacting while not“methodical.” See the works cited in notes 109 and 121, above, as well as Justice As Translation: An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism (Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1990), 89-112.