11:15-12:30 TR
Topic: Law and Literature

ABOVE SECTION OPEN TO HONORS STUDENTS ONLY.  OBTAIN AUTHORIZATION
FROM HONORS DIVISION, 324 N. JORDAN.

COAS INTENSIVE WRITING SECTION

Writers have always been fascinated with the image of the law. Although our earliest texts
(Greek tragedy, the Bible, Norse sagas) celebrate the establishment of legal codes, lawyers and
legal systems are most often represented as harsh, manipulative, pedantic, or arbitrary, and the
court is seen as a narrow arena in which people are cast in predefined roles and unique events
ruled by established norms. Perhaps writers are drawn to the figure of the law because, even as
they strive for a personal voice, they recognize that the need to formalize and define plays an
equally tyrannical part in literary work.

In this course we shall look at the implications of this paradox for law and for literature: the way
the law, for example, as it imposes order, appears to sacrifice individual experience; and the
ways fiction struggles against its own kinds of formal domination.  We will explore the insights
that novelists and dramatists bring to the basic concerns of lawyers by examining such topics as
the influence of the past (i.e. private and public history, and legal precedent), sources of textual
meaning, morality and human motivation, marginal groups and the rhetoric of authority.  Along
with texts selected from such writers as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Melville, Hawthorne, Kafka,
Faulkner, and Morrison, we will also look at particular legal cases involving first amendment
issues (i.e. religious expression and privacy).  The cases will allow us to look closely at the way
our legal system works and to explore how society, through its literature as well as its actions,
responds to the principles, practice, and language of that system.

Students from all disciplines are welcome. You will be asked to do several kinds of writing,
including 4 short papers and some revision.