AML 5027 Spring 2023 Mariano

In this course we explore various historical and formal configurations of and approaches to law and literature, with a focus on U.S. American fiction. Explaining law’s circulation with other disciplines, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote, “it would not be excessive to say that [law] creates the social world, but only if we remember that it is this world which first creates the law” (“The Force of Law” 839). We will put flesh on Bourdieu’s notion of the circularity between law, literature, and the social world by using fiction and the tools of the literary critic to access (and assess) sources, alternatives, critiques, precursors, and inheritors of official law. Some of the issues we will explore: ideas about justice, fairness, and legality; notions of genre as “law,” including formal “legal genres,” such as judicial decisions and statutes, informal “legal genres,” such as the detective story and the mystery; discourses of authority and world-making; theories of power; segregation; race and gender equality; privacy rights; forms of extra-legal justice; and constructions of loss and liability.