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Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization

Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /188 What is “the confession problem”? Part of the problem, Brooks writes, resides in a general tension between the “cultural urge toward confession” (seen in the context of psychotherapy, talk-show television, and political scandal pace Clinton) and “our suspicion of confession” (p. 9). We want to hear confessions, and yet we do not always believe what we hear. Confessions are also speech acts, and a second part of the problem arises from the instability of confession as a speech act, the “speaking guilt” of Brooks’s subtitle. This aspect of the confession problem is most urgent in the context of legal confessions, which in theory rely on the stability of confessions (their voluntariness and their truth) when in fact this faith in their stability, as Brooks illustrates, is rarely warranted. Moreover, unlike storytelling in general, legal confessions—ideally what Brooks, paraphrasing Justice Brennan, calls “storytelling without fear”—do something. They have real consequences. Brooks’s writing is almost always suggestive rather than prescriptive; nevertheless, he does write passionately about the fact that while confessions can have enormous impacts on people’s lives, the strange complexity of these particular speech acts has rarely been adequately scrutinized. Given that our culture seems at http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization

Collings, David
Comparative Literature , Volume 54 (2) – Jan 1, 2002
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2002 by University of Oregon
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/-54-2-193
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /188 What is “the confession problem”? Part of the problem, Brooks writes, resides in a general tension between the “cultural urge toward confession” (seen in the context of psychotherapy, talk-show television, and political scandal pace Clinton) and “our suspicion of confession” (p. 9). We want to hear confessions, and yet we do not always believe what we hear. Confessions are also speech acts, and a second part of the problem arises from the instability of confession as a speech act, the “speaking guilt” of Brooks’s subtitle. This aspect of the confession problem is most urgent in the context of legal confessions, which in theory rely on the stability of confessions (their voluntariness and their truth) when in fact this faith in their stability, as Brooks illustrates, is rarely warranted. Moreover, unlike storytelling in general, legal confessions—ideally what Brooks, paraphrasing Justice Brennan, calls “storytelling without fear”—do something. They have real consequences. Brooks’s writing is almost always suggestive rather than prescriptive; nevertheless, he does write passionately about the fact that while confessions can have enormous impacts on people’s lives, the strange complexity of these particular speech acts has rarely been adequately scrutinized. Given that our culture seems at

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Comparative Literature – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2002

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