On the Case

Abstract

663 Thanks to Bradin Cormack, Richard Neer, and Tom Mitchell for reading beyond compare. Thanks also to Anat Benzvi, Burke Butler, Andrea Haslanger, Elizabeth Hutcheon, Jay Williams, Andrew Yale, and Abigail Zitin for their generous, creative, and rigorous editorial labor, without which none of this work would appear. 1. Peter Galison argues against the naive view of the self-evidence of case-study knowledge and the comparability of all case studies with each other in his “Specific Theory,”Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 379–83. Nonetheless, the surge of the singularity concept in some contemporary humanist discussions—as that which resists being generalizable—runs antagonistically into the prevalence of case-study narrativity in scholarship, whichmobilizes a whole variety of descriptive and interpretive processes of determining likeness, generality, or patterning and whose interest in typification often (incoherently) produces evidences of singularity as the optimisticmoment of excess or surplus to its very analytic activity.Mark Seltzer provides great analyses of the legal and literary development of the situation of case logic in Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York, 1998). On the Case