Problems in American Literature
Class Information
Instructor: Jerng, Mark
CRN: 44630
Time: M 12:10-3:00pm
Location: 120 Voorhies
Breadth: Later American
Focus: Interdiscipline, Method
Description
Topic: Law and Literature: Racial Differentiation, Social Life, and Speculative Knowledge
Course Description:
This seminar has two research areas that we will work to put into dialogue: 1) genealogies of critical race theory in legal studies; 2) speculative writing. With the first, we will focus on the ways in which critical race theorists have analyzed the law and its reproduction of norms of freedom, property, contract, personhood, corporations, and violence. We will think through the law as a regulatory apparatus that uses grammars and conventions such as the counterfactual, precedent in-place-of history, tort, causation, and testimony. With the second, we will focus on writers using practices of speculation across various modes of writing (historical speculation; what ifs; time-travel; science fiction) that invite alternative knowledge structures, ways of being and making realities possible, and worldbuilding. We will develop our approaches for thinking across legal and literary modes of thinking. We will have some explicit help in the form of the legal theorist Derrick Bell whose major critical work consists in large part of speculative fiction. Throughout we will decipher intersections across law and speculative writing that reproduce and legitimize modes of individuality, freedom, incorporation, justice, contract, and property-making entangled with racial capitalism. But we will cultivate re-imaginings of sociality, collectivization, and sense-making drawing from the speculative worldmaking of Bell, Octavia Butler, Cherie Dimaline, W.E.B. DuBois, N.K. Jemisin, Victor Lavalle, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Patricia Williams, among others.
Texts will not be ordered through the UC Davis bookstore. The texts that you will need to purchase are: Octavia Butler, Kindred; Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves; Victor Lavalle's Destroyer; NK Jemisin, The City We Became. All other readings will be provided as .pdfs
Readings:
[Speculative Fiction]
Sherman Alexie, "The Sin-Eaters"
Octavia Butler, Kindred
Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves
N.K. Jemisin, "The Ones Who Stay and Fight," The City We Became
Victor Lavalle's Destroyer [the full graphic novel]
Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"
[Speculative Law]
Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism
Sora Han, "Letters of the Law"
Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights
[Critical Essays and Book chapters across legal and literary studies, Black studies, Native American Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies]
Kimberle Crenshaw,"Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics"
Jacques Derrida, "The Force of Law" (pages 21-48) in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice
W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (excerpts)
Patrice Douglass, "The Claim of Right to Property: Social Violence and Political Right"
Stanley Fish, "Force" from Doing What Comes Naturally
Sora Han, "Slavery as Contract: Betty's Case and the Question of Freedom"
Manu Karuka, "The Prose of Countersovereignty," "Shareholder Whiteness" in Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad
Mari Matsuda, "On Causation"
Imani Perry, "Producing Personhood" (pages 42-61) from Vexy Thing: Gender and Liberation
Audra Simpson, "Borders, Cigarettes, and Sovereignty" in Mohawk Interruptus
Cass Sunstein, "Reasoning and Legal Reasoning"; "Analogical Reasoning" in Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict
Legal Cases:
Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Plessy v. Ferguson
Mashpee v. New Seabury Corp.
Parents Involved in Cmty Schools v. Seattle Public School District
Other cases referred to and discussed in critical essays
Grading
One response paper in relation to a reading or readings from the first three weeks of class, engaging with specific concepts, arguments, or speculative methods encountered there (750 words). This assignment is geared toward developing skills in reading and analyzing argumentative non-fiction. We are reading mainly legal articles in these first three weeks, and so the challenge is to think about the terms and concepts the authors are using; the methods of argumentation being used; and/or how they are deploying their examples, among other aspects of argumentative non-fiction.
One response paper in relation to one or more of our discussions of a work of speculative fiction that engages with specific interrelations between the secondary materials on law and the speculative fiction (750 words). This assignment is geared toward figuring out how to get the fiction and the legal work to speak to each other, to find some points where they can be productively brought together.
One Final Essay: This could be...
a) conference-length (2500-3000 words) or article-length (4500-5000 words) paper of literary and cultural criticism engaging across legal concepts/arguments and speculative fiction;
or
b) non-fiction essay (3,000-5,000 words)
or
c) speculative fiction essay (3,000-5,000 words).
You may incorporate either or both of your response papers into this final essay.
Required outline and meeting regarding the final essay so that I can give feedback to help guide the final version.
Texts
TBD