LIT 4608

In this course we will study some of the most influential approaches to plumbing the intersections of law and literature, with a focus on U.S. fiction from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century. 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). To put flesh on Bourdieu’s notion of the circularity between discourses of law, literature, and the social world by using fiction and the tools of the literary critic to investigate disciplinary modes of meaning-making in order to access (and assess) sources, alternatives, critiques, precursors, and inheritors of law--official or otherwise. Topics of focus include: legal interpretation, personhood, liability and loss, legal mythologies and the “folk tales” of justice, the carceral imagination, and other issues related to discourse and power.