Representations of Law in American Fiction (T. Sasso*bre)

This seminar is primarily concerned with the ways American fiction represents law as culture. The texts assigned— written by James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Henry James, Frank Norris, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, Sherman Alexie, and others—register changes in property law, the law of contracts, intellectual property and the legal constructions of race and privacy in relation to the maintenance of personal identity, community stability, and linguistic meaning. The terms and stakes of these relationships will inform our readings of the texts themselves, as well as our understanding of their representations of law. We will also consider the points of contact between literary narrative and narrative in law.

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