AML 5027 Spring 2022 Mariano

The law “creates the social world,” the same social world, Pierre Bourdieu writes, “which first creates the law” (“The Force of Law” 839). The dialectic Bourdieu puts forward will provide us with a set of working assumptions—namely, that the social and material worlds we inhabit, engender, and maintain are inescapably normative and narrative, and, further, that neither history, nor literature, nor law can break free of the paths that have been plotted upon reality by our imaginations. It is, after all, from language, corpus, and myth that institutions, prescriptions, and ways of being-in-the-world are constructed. Accordingly, the primary intellectual focus of the class will be on the problematics of configuring the word and the world, the discursive and the coercive, the imaginary and the given. We will read really interesting theory, formal legal texts, and a lot of great, mostly American, fiction. You will read extensively, submit short response papers, take a turn leading discussion, and write a culminating seminar paper.