CLL214 | Literature and Law

This course will explore the intersection of literature and law, building on some of the themes raised in the core course ‘Law and Society’ (as listed in the course outline MSY101). We will evaluate and examine literature as a cultural practice that generates, represents, critiques and shapes notions of justice, entitlement and personhood. We will briefly discuss the shared history of literary and legal education in Britain and colonial India followed by introspection into the distinct but comparable ways in which the novel as a form of literary practice and modern law developed methods to address the question of moral sense and rational order.

We will then go on to engage with the different approaches to literature and law – Rhetoric and persuasion, Law in literature, Law as literature and the entrance of literary criticism in legal interpretation. We will read important literary works that compliment these approaches and, also reveal important questions about the relation between social life and law. The course predominantly engages novels or plays, excerpts of which we will read in class. They are arranged along the following themes – the aporia of judgement (The Trial by Franz Kafka), the performance of justice and the nature of legitimacy (Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht), the problem of social norms acquiring the force of law (Silence! The Court is in Session by Vijay Tendulkar) and the relation between norm and exception (Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee). As we read together, students will also be introduced to methods of literary interpretation paying attention to context, perspective, form, narrative, testimony, reasoning and rhetoric.

The rationale for the section of themes and texts – Apart from complementing the different approaches to Law and Literature, the plays and novels selected share the common concern of what it means to mediate and regulate social life. This is a question that besets modern literature itself but is exemplified in the arbitration of justice and resolution of conflict, making law the ground for reflection among these authors. This allows us to think about the ways literary interpretation and legal interpretation can interpenetrate, oppose or support one another as both literature and law mediate and are mediated by social life in distinct ways.

The secondary literature we will engage with will comprise of commentaries by literary critics or legal scholars and will help us read the literary works and understand the approaches in the field. We will also pay attention to their method of interpretation and their arguments about what it means to interpret texts and social life.

Layout and Pedagogical Method –

After the first week which will provide a general history, each alternate week will begin with an introduction into an approach in the field of Literature and Law and in the following session, we will read the literary text and continue with supporting commentaries to explore the themes in the text further.

– This course is designed to be discussion-focused and Socratic, however, students are expected to write short reflections on each of the primary texts in-class.

– Students will be divided into groups and assigned one novel/play to read in its entirety and summarise for the rest of the class before we begin the discussion on that text.

Excerpts of the primary texts will be read and discussed in detail in-class.