Costantini, Cristina --- "The unburiable contract: Grant Gilmore’s discontinuous parabola and the literary construction of American legal style" [2017] ELECD 613; in Monateri, Giuseppe Pier (ed), "Comparative Contract Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 245

Book Title: Comparative Contract Law

Editor(s): Monateri, Giuseppe Pier

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849804516

Section: Chapter 12

Section Title: The unburiable contract: Grant Gilmore’s discontinuous parabola and the literary construction of American legal style

Author(s): Costantini, Cristina

Number of pages: 58

Abstract/Description:

More than 40 years have passed since the sardonic Grant Gilmore oracularly pronounced his vigorous and Nietzschean-sounded epitaph to honour the decease of Contract. Time elapsed, and even the agnostic prophet of the legal uncertainty died in his sleep in the Eighties of the last century, but the intellectual debate on the late relics of a wellstructured body of law has never faded. With a wavering intensity, Gilmore’s secular talk continues to rule us from its grave, summoning up its religious intimations. It is absorbed in the general flow of thoughts and doctrines; it is drawn into the endless, alternating rhythm of tidy order and sprawling agony that marks the common destiny of Humanities; it is blended into a creative mixture of old and new, in order to compose an aesthetic structure out of multiple and changeable styles. The same poetic form of the elegy, clearly evoked by Gilmore’s intonation, comes to suture the unavoidability of death with a resurgent memory: it articulates the metaphysic dance that stages the movements of living and dying as the intense counterpoints of a simultaneous appearing and disappearing now of the spiritual, now of the carnal body. The literary celebration of the Dead emplots a process of re-interpretation and re-signification at the lyrical intersection of mourning and praise: folding into and out of conventional meanings, it emerges in the midst of an articulated fragmentation of traditions and visions, accepted discourses and prospective imaginations.