University of Calgary

English 607.39 - Theoretical and Cultural Studies - Literature and the Law

Instructor:  Dr. Jon Kertzer

Monday, 9:00- 11:30

Mail to: jkertzer [at] ucalgary [dot] ca

Course Description

This course studies how laws, legality and judicial processes influence literary forms and values.  It is concerned with both the legality or illegality of literature, and the literary character of legal judgments.  It will combine a study of critical essays, available in a course pack, with readings of a range of literary works drawn from different historical periods. Discussion will focus on topics such as:

  1. Poetic justice: the relation between literary and judicial forms
  2. Courtroom drama: the law as spectacle
  3. The right and the good: aesthetic representations of legality and morality
  4. Juris-diction: the speaking of the law; the relation between the law and language
  5. Jurisdictions: privacy and publicity - fields of authority
  6. Legal fictions: the fictionality of legal narratives
  7. Bending and breaking the law: the pleasures and dangers of transgression
  8. Beyond the law: the appeal of law for sanction; the ungovernable
  9. Me-you-us: The relation between personal freedom and social liberty
  10. This hurts me more than it hurts you: the violence or cruelty of the law
  11. Girls gone wild, boys will be boys: the law and gender
  12. Natural ... law: the relation between the law and nature

Literary texts 

Texts taken from the following list represent a variety of historical periods and legal issues.

Sophocles, Antigone

Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Aphra Behn, The Rover

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

Herman Melville, Billy Budd

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Joy Kogawa, Obasan

a Sherlock Holmes story

Franz Kafka, The Trial

Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty

Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

M.G Vassanji, The Book of Secrets

Critical articles  (course pack - essays will be drawn from this list)

  1. 1. Julie Stone Peters, "Law, Literature, and the Vanishing Real: On the future of an interdisciplinary illusion." PMLA 120.2 (March 2005).
  2. Ronald Dworkin. "How Law is Like Literature." A Matter of Principle. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.
  3. James Bernard Murphy, "Introduction: Natural, Customary, and Positive Law." The Philosophy of Positive Law: Foundations of Jurisprudence. New Haven and Yale: Yale UP, 2005.
  4. H.L.A. Hart, "Laws and Morals." The Concept of Law. Oxford: OUP, 1994. ch.9.
  5. Costas Douzinas & Adam Gearey, ch 1, Critical Jurisprudence: The Political Philosophy of Justice.
  6. Gary Wills, The Dramaturgy of Death" New York Review of Books 48:10, June 21, 2001. 6-10.
  7. Martin Jay. "Must Justice Be Blind? The Challenge of Images to the Law" Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law. Ed. Costas Douzinas & Lynda Nead. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1999. 19-35.
  8. Paul Ricoeur, "Justice and Vengeance." Reflections of the Just. Trans. David Pellauer. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2007. or
  9. Paul Ricoeur, "Sanction, Rehabilitation, Pardon." The Just. Trans. David Pellauer. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2000.
  10. Jacques Derrida. from "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority'." Deconstruction & the Possibility of Justice. Ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld & David Gray Carlson. 3-67.
  11. Michel Foucault, "A Preface to Transgression," Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays & Interviews. Trans. Donald Bouchard & Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. 29-52.
  12. Peter A. Winn, "Legal Ritual." Readings in Ritual Studies. Ed. Ronald Grimes. Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. 552-65.
  13. Laura Hanft Korobkin. "Narrative Battles in the Courtroom." Field Work: Sites in Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Marjorie Garber. New York: Routledge.