Law & Literature
Class Information
Instructor: Nicolazzo, Sal
CRN: 56640
Time: MWF 11:00-11:50am
Location: Olson 118
GE Areas: American Cultures, Governance, and History Domestic Diversity Writing Experience
Description
Law and Literature: Space, Place, and Movement
Law profoundly shapes the physical and political geography of the world we live in, how we move or cannot move through that world, and how we experience ourselves in relation to the spaces around us. This course examines how laws, legal decisions, and legal theory have defined key spatial concepts?borders, land, the nation, the home?and how literary texts can complicate, illuminate, or imagine worlds beyond these legal histories. With particular focus on how legal and literary histories of space, place, and movement shed light on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, labor, and settler colonialism, this course brings important legal documents and concepts into conversation with a wide variety of literary texts, both historical and contemporary. By tracing how law and literature intersect and respond to each other, we will consider how legal and literary language can make, unmake, and remake worlds.
One book, Valeria Luiselli?s Lost Children Archive, will be available as a print copy in the UCD Bookstore or as a free ebook through Library Course Reserves. All other reading will be posted as PDFs on Canvas.
Grading
Active participation (discussion and in-class informal writing)
Reading-comprehension skill-building exercises
Multiple, scaffolded analytical writing assignments (see syllabus for more details)
Texts
"A Red Girl's Reasoning", E. Pauline Johnson
Dispatch: Poems, Cameron Awkward-Rich
WHEREAS, Layli Long Soldier
Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli
The Female Husband, Henry Fielding
from unincorporated territory [hacha], Craig Santos Perez
Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip
Second Treatise of Government, John Locke
Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts, William Apess