Law and Culture in American Fiction

How do we identify an owner? What does a citizen look like? Whose privacy requires protection? The stories we tell about the experience of being Americans bolster and undermine particular legal arguments and conclusions. In the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, novels were an important source of these narratives. And over the last century movies, television and other forms of visual storytelling have recycled these stock narratives countless times. In this interdisciplinary seminar, a novel or story is paired with a contemporary legal text (and often historical material for context) each week. These pairings track the maintenance of personal identity, community stability, and even linguistic meaning across shifting legal constructions of citizenship, race, gender, and class; changes in the law of property, contract, and privacy; and other legal and extralegal deployments of the (violent) authority of the state. The writers whose work we will consider include James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Henry James, William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, John Okada, Katherine Anne Porter and Sherman Alexie. (These authors are known for great writing and cultural influence, but also, in some cases, overt racism and personal misconduct.) Reading and writing with an increased awareness of the background narratives implicit in our legal arguments is among the goals of the course. Elements used in grading: Class participation, attendance, and written assignments. Automatic grading penalty waived for writers. For Research "R" credit, students may petition to complete one long paper based on independent research with consent of the instructor.