Admission requirements
—
Description
Literature, whether modern or some thousands of years old, is a primary medium to investigate what it means to do justice or to make (and apply) law. As may be clear from our choice of words, this course will not go into the essence of justice or of law, but will focus instead on what it means to, indeed, do justice and to make law – how that doing and making is made possible through language and how this connects to aesthetics. In relation to these issues, the history of literature shows a complicated relationship with law and justice. The two fields of literature and law are, in a sense, analogous, both working with and through language in similar ways. Law and justice have also been dominant themes in literature and have been explored through literature. Then, of course, literature itself has its own laws and rules. Fourthly, there are literary concepts that have been used to ground law and justice. And finally literature has been the medium by means of which issues have been addressed that could not be addressed by the system of law because they exceed the law.
In relation to all this we will be reading theoretical and literary texts or looking at works of art. The theory will deal with texts by Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Peter Goodrich, Robert Cover, Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, Jeanne Gaakeer, Cécile Fabre and Shoshana Felman, amongst others. These are the literary texts that we will focus upon: the biblical book of Job; an anti-stalinist war-novel by Russian writer Valerie Grossman, Life and fate; some of Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstücke; a postcolonial novel by the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things; a book with images and texts called a visual essay by the Black-American artist Kara Walker: After the Deluge; several poems and a moving autobiographical work that is also an extended essay by South-African poet and novelist Antjie Krog, Country of my Skull; and last but not least a stunning movie by Peter Greenaway, The Cook, The Thief, his Wife and her Lover.
Course objectives
To be able to move independently in the field of literature and law, and to gain insight in the defining aspects of the productive and dynamic relation between literature, justice and law.
Timetable
Mode of instruction
Seminar
Assessment method
Paper
Blackboard
—
Reading list
To be announced
Registration
Students have to apply for this course with the registration system of the university uSis. General information about registration with uSis you can find here in Dutch and in English
Exchange and Study Abroad students, please see the Study in Leiden website for information on how to apply
Contact information
Please contact , Prof.dr.F.W.A. Korsten
Remarks
—