Law and Culture in American Fiction, Stanford University

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. Stanford also offers a JD/PhD Law Program in Modern Thought and Literature. For more information, see here: https://law.stanford.edu/education/degrees/joint-degrees-within-stanford-university/law-program-modern-thought-literature/. This information has been collected for the Post-Discipline Online Syllabus Database. The database explores the use of literature by schools of professional education in North America. It forms part of a larger project titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities, led by Dr Merve Emre with the assistance of Dr Hayley G. Toth. You can find more information about the project at https://postdiscipline.english.ox.ac.uk/. Data was collected and accurate in 2021/22.