ENGL 240 Introduction to Law and Literature
Literature and the law share several fundamental elements. Both employ storytelling to create impressions of characters and represent events. Both serve a didactic and disciplinary function within society. And both involve complicated acts of interpretation to make sense of the narrative at hand. These are some of the reasons that scholars have been interested in the relationship between the two disciplines. At the same time, there are significant tensions between the two disciplines around claims to truth, authority, and voice that have posed problems to the task of thinking about law and literature together. This course examines the history of the interdiscipline, including its various forms: law in literature, law as literature, and law and literature. We will read foundational texts in the law and literature movement, as well as contemporary examples of the methodology, which we will apply to film and literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Texts we will consider include E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton.
ENGL 240 will introduce students to the relationships between law and literature in the UK, the US, and areas where these countries historically imposed imperial law.
Prerequisite
None.