Can A Legal Event Be A Culture Phenomenon?

This thesis starts from Simpson's new novel If I did It(2006), which has caused a sensation again in the mass media and re-directed the world's attention to the so-called "Trial of the Century" of O.J. Simpson's murder case in the late 1990s. It was a sensational legal event in USA, enlisting a dream team both of the prosecution and the defense, and both its dramatic process and controversial decision have had a massive impact on American society. Such a rich phenomenon is bound to arouse academic interest in various fields. Accordingly, this research tries to explore it as a typical American cultural phenomenon and labels it into a hyponym termed as Sensational American Celebrity Trials. It is assumed that a dynamic and comprehensive event like this one cannot be effectively studied unless its scope and paradigm can be systematically defined, and a culture study usually requires a text. Therefore effort is made to turn this event into a specific text of its type—Sensational American Celebrity Trials—with typical structure, motifs, functions and variables. This operation entails re-defining culture, text and textuality, and the adoption of a workable theoretical framework. Since this is an entirely new attempt in culture studies, there is no such a theoretical framework available. Consequently, effort is made to construct one, which has resulted in a combination of elements borrowed from different fields of study, including cultural anthropology (using the descriptive approach of ethnography to find the motifs and structures), text linguistics (especially the explanation of textuality), cultural studies (the coverage of culture and notion of text) and cognitional techniques (new interpretation and application of existing methods and concepts). This framework proves valid in the construction of the intended textuality for the issue in question, which (the textuality) is, in turn, found applicable not only to this specific case but also to other cases of its kind. Moreover, this research is not limited to the construction of the mentioned textuality; it also tries to test the referential function of the latter to other American values and derive from the study of this event some generality and particularity for cultural phenomena.