Writing Justice: Deliberating Law in Literature
What responsibility do you owe to another person based not only on codified law, but on principles of natural justice? Do you have an ethical obligation to be hospitable to those with whom you are in conflict? The law purports to protect our basic human rights, but what happens when the law itself becomes overly mechanistic and inhumane? In this literature-based writing course, these and other inquiries about justice will guide our thematic focus and writing topics. As this course merges the literary and “real” worlds, our reading list will draw from various literary genres and intellectual disciplines, such as novels (Shelley’s Frankenstein), short stories (Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”), essays (Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”), selections of philosophy (Levinas) and literary criticism (Derrida), and writing theory (Harris’ Rewriting). Writing about literature through a legal critical lens offers us the opportunity to explore the complex psychological and philosophical questions underlying legal jurisprudence. Indeed, considering justice within the context of character interaction and motivation, personal narrative, and even aesthetic beauty allows us to analyze the essential human and societal implications of the law.
As this is a small, seminar-style writing course, excellent participation and active engagement is expected and required. We will spend much of our time in this course collaborating with our colleagues in writing workshops and peer critiques and in cooperative seminar discussions, and we will be guided by the understanding that writing is a social process and a critical engagement with ourselves and the world. In addition to shorter writing assignments in the form of reading responses and an annotated bibliography, you will have three longer writing projects: a close-reading analysis of a poem; a paper in which you explicate a literary work through a secondary-source, critical lens; and a critical essay in which you use primary and secondary sources to support your own critical inquiry about an issue of justice in literary texts of your choosing.
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