Thinking in Cases
Fiction, Law, and the Case History
Format:Paperback
Publisher:The University of Chicago Press
Publishing:8th Mar '27
£18.00
This title is due to be published on 8th March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
How the form of the case history became an important way of studying the individual as an exemplary case in medicine, psychoanalysis, law, and the novel.
What does it mean when we address ourselves to a specific problem and treat it as a “case” that needs resolution, a resolution that may in turn offer us more general lessons? The “case history” has become a central form of thought and analysis in our culture, but rarely has it been studied on its own. In Thinking in Cases, the distinguished critic Peter Brooks zeroes in on a kind of thinking that we all know—and often use—without understanding its dimensions and its history.
This book ponders what we do and mean when we think in cases—when we take up specific instances with a view to making them exemplary. Brooks brings to this study decades of reflection on the psychoanalytic case history, on the rhetoric of the legal case, and on novels that unfold as cases seeking solutions. Brooks focuses on the case-history’s emergence in the late nineteenth century: first, he examines how Henry James’s uses of narrative parallel case-study methods in law, medicine, and psychoanalysis. Elsewhere, he traces the case history from Hippocratic medicine through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fiction to a startling legal case from Victorian England involving shipwreck and cannibalism. Other chapters discuss a tale of madness by Balzac and Freud’s most speculative works, especially Moses and Monotheism. A final chapter examines recent novels—Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Coetzee’s Disgrace, Modiano’s Dora Bruder, and Erpenbeck’s Kairos—as case studies.
“What is a case? A particular set of circumstances that yet has a lesson for us all, that uses those particulars to make some general claim about the way things are. Many of them take the form of stories, whether in Freud or Conan Doyle, but others show up in the classroom, in the case studies that became the staple of legal training right around the time the Viennese doctor set to work. Peter Brooks’s richly suggestive Thinking in Cases revisits that late nineteenth century moment, and draws upon a long life of reading and thinking to offer a set of provocative cases of his own.”
* Michael Gorra, Smith College *“No one in the world is a more reliable guide to the deep connections between narrative form and understanding than Peter Brooks. In this marvelous new book, Brooks illuminates the narrative form of the case study, which underpins a great deal of how medicine and law are actually practiced. It is a great achievement.”
* Robert Post, Yale Law School *“In this thought-provoking and sharply argued study, Peter Brooks connects a prodigious range of novels to forms of the case study. Medicine, law, psychoanalysis, and police work create narratives out of cases, as do novelists from Henry James and Conan Doyle to Patrick Mondiano and Jenny Erpenbeck. A chapter on What Maisie Knew is a tour de force bringing the novel to bear on Freud’s clinical and Antonin Scalia’s judicial judgments.”
* John Brenkman, author of "James the Minimalist: An Essay on the Late Novels" *“In the law, in medicine, in literature and in psychoanalysis, we think in terms of cases. But what makes a case a case? By what sleight of logical or lazy thinking does a singular story get converted into a usable paradigm, for future reference? With choice examples and cool attentiveness, Peter Brooks’s new book is a sharply engaging exploration of the curious case of the case.”
* Rachel Bowlby, author of "Émile Zola: Writing Modern LifISBN: 9780226856469
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 454g
240 pages