"The second essay, by Dominick LaCapra, also takes up the theme of repetition as it asks what makes a legal trial worth remembering. Focusing on the nineteenth-century trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire for “outrage to public and religious morality and to good morals,” LaCapra demonstrates that the aesthetic standard used to judge these writers demanded that a work of art provide “purely symbolic and ‘spiritual’ resolution of the problems it explored.” Flaubert and Baudelaire were, in essence, subject to criminal prosecution for their commitment to literary realism that led them to flour some of the representational taboos of their time. Yet in LaCapra’s view their trials were not, in a strict sense, show trials whose purpose was to instill a broad, collective memory. They were not designed to recall from the past events that “insistently made demands on collective and individual remembrance and thus necessitated entry into the public sphere.” They were instead intended to create a memory of the consequences that would attach to writers who transgressed public norms and whose “deviant” work might have a broad public impact. LaCapra worries about the use of law for such memorial purposes, and he notes the continuing controversy over whether histiography has the function of transmitting memory. In his own view history has two related objectives, namely the adjudication of truth claims about the past and the transmission of memory. It is, however, the memory of the criminal trial, especially those in which literature is put on trial, to which LaCapra calls out attention. Such trials raise questions about how literary texts can be read in particular contexts, and they call on us to remember the situatedness and contingency of all readings. When faced with literary texts that are in some sense transgressive, law, LaCapra suggests, will read through the lens of its own reconstructions of the past-through precedent-and, as a result, will read in a regulative, normalizing way. Law will seek to protect the literary canon and repress the more disconcerting features of literature in order to make it a vehicle for the promotion of conventional social values. Yet this kind of reading, a reading that serves to commemorate convention, defeats literature. LaCapra calls for a kind of literary privilege in which what the law may justifiably prohibit in social life should not be prohibited in art or literature. Art could thus serve society as a safe haven for exploration and experimentation."