Teaching Law and Literature
- Editors: Austin Sarat, Cathrine O. Frank, Matthew Anderson
- Pages: 516
- Published: 2011
- ISBN: 9781603290937 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603290920 (Hardcover)
“It is an excellent book, enviably able to represent itself credibly as both a prospective textbook and an original intellectual contribution to the field.”
—Law and Humanities
This volume provides a resource for teachers interested in learning about the field of law and literature and shows how to bring its insights to bear in their classrooms, both in the liberal arts and in law schools. Essays in the first section, “Theory and History of the Movement,” provide a retrospective of the field and look forward to new developments. The second section, “Model Courses,” offers readers an array of possibilities for structuring courses that integrate legal issues with the study of literature, from The Canterbury Tales to current prison literature. In “Texts,” the third section, guidance is provided for teaching not only written documents (novels, plays, trial reports) but also cultural objects: digital media, Native American ceremonies, documentary theater, hip-hop. The volume’s contributors investigate what constitutes law and literature and how each informs the other.
Philip Auslander
Ayelet Ben-Yishai
Mary Flowers Braswell
Peter Brooks
Kieran Dolin
Florence Dore
Alex Feerst
David H. Fisher
Nan Goodman
Chaya Halberstam
Susan Sage Heinzelman
Peter C. Herman
Diane Hoeveler
Harold Joseph
Valerie Karno
Lenora Ledwon
Nancy S. Marder
Bridget M. Marshall
Alyce Miller
D. Quentin Miller
Harriet Murav
Victoria Myers
Linda Myrsiades
Jacqueline O’Connor
Julie Stone Peters
Greg Pingree
Ravit Reichman
Lisa Rodensky
Hilary Schor
Richard Schur
Caleb Smith
Cristine Soliz
Simon Stern
Nomi Stolzenberg
Brook Thomas
Zoe Trodd
Elliot Visconsi
Patricia D. Watkins
Richard H. Weisberg
Robert Weisberg
Robin West
James Boyd White
Theodore Ziolkowski
Introduction (1)
Part I: Theory and History of the Movement
The Cultural Background of The Legal Imagination (29)
Law and Literature as Survivor (40)
Law, Literature: Where Are We? (61)
Law, Literature, and the Vanishing Real: On the Future of an Interdisciplinary Illusion (71)
Law, Literature, and Cultural Unity: Between Celebration and Lament (86)
Literature, Culture, and Law at Duke University (98)
Part II: Model Courses
Where the Evidence Leads: Teaching Gothic Novels and the Law (117)
Making Crime Pay in the Victorian Novel Survey Course (126)
Teaching Legal Realism: A Senior Seminar on the Realist Novel and the Law (136)
American Undead: Teaching the Cultural Life of Civil Death (147)
Teaching Legal Fiction: Law and The Canterbury Tales (155)
Teaching Early Modern Literature through the Ancient Constitution (162)
Law and Drama in the Romantic Era: A Model Course (172)
Immigration, Law, and American Literature (180)
Vital Visions: On Teaching Prison Literature (189)
Using Critical Race Theory to Teach African American Literature (197)
The Legal and Literary Animal (206)
Native American Literature, Ceremony, and Law (217)
Free Speech and Free Love: The Law and Literature of the First Amendment (225)
“The Gollum Problem”: Teaching Performance and/as Intellectual Property (234)
Literary Evidence and Legal Aesthetics (244)
An Introduction to Law and Literature for English Majors (253)
Law and Literature as Cultural and Aesthetic Products: Studying Interdisciplinary Texts in Tandem (262)
Literature and Law Lite: Approaches in Surveys and General Education Courses (268)
Part III: Texts
Measure for Measure: No Remedy (279)
Bleak House and the Connections between Law and Literature (288)
Guilty Reading: Obscenity Law, American Modernism, and the Case for Teaching Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (296)
Literature in Its Legal Context: Kafka (307)
Dostoevsky and the Law (314)
Law and Literature of the Hebrew Bible (323)
Law and Revenge Violence: From Saga to Modern Fiction (333)
Teaching Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature: The Adventures of Rivella (345)
Law, Literature, and Feminism: Broadening the Canon with New Texts (354)
Neutrality in Law and Literature: Reading the Supreme Court with Joseph Conrad (366)
How Rhetoric Shapes Cultural Legitimacy: Teaching Law Students the Moral Syllogism (375)
Roger Williams and the Law and Literature of Colonial New England (385)
Sangrado and the Cloven Foot: A Case in Teaching Eighteenth-Century Law (394)
Performing the Law in Contemporary Documentary Theater (407)
“Fight the Power”: Hip-Hop in the Law and Literature Classroom (415)
Ten Kinds of Law and Literature Texts You Haven’t Read (425)
American Blueprints: Alternative Declarations and Constitutions in the Protest Tradition (436)
Notes on Contributors (447)
Works Cited (453)
Index (497)
“Students in undergraduate humanities courses will benefit from studying the way legal realities help shape and inform literary works. Law teachers may usefully assign chapters from the text to explore law’s narrative drama.”
—Richard Sherwin, New York Law School
