MONASH UNIVERSITY FACULTY HANDBOOKS

Arts Graduate Handbook 1996

Authorised by Academic Registrar, April 1996

ENM4190/5190

Legal fictions: intersections between law and literature

Terry Threadgold

Synopsis This subject will take its theoretical directions from recent work in critical legal studies, feminist jurisprudence and the law and literature movement. We will employ a variety of interdisciplinary strategies - including critical discourse analysis, poststructuralism, deconstruction, feminism, and contemporary literary theory - to explore a wide range of discursive and generic practices in legal, media and literary texts. We will also discuss the historical role of literature and literary criticism in the construction of legal subjects and legal concepts of meaning, text, interpretation, truth, objectivity and authority. The subject will have a feminist emphasis, and will include work on ethics, the body, discourse and feminist jurisprudence.

Assessment (8 points) Exercise (2000 words): 30% + Seminar paper (1500 words): 30% + Essay (2500 words): 40%

Assessment (12 points) Exercise (3000 words): 30% + Seminar paper (2000 words): 30% + Research essay (4000 words): 40%

Prescribed texts

• Cardinal M The words to say it Van Vactor and Goodheart
• Caryl Churchill Vinegar Tom Methuen
• Collins W The law and the lady OUP
• Foucault M (ed.) I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother ... a case of parricide in the seventeenth century Nebraska U P
• Gare N The fringe dwellers Sun Australia
• Garner H The first stone Picador
• Hardy H Tess of the D'Urbervilles Penguin
• Jolley E The newspaper of Claremont Street Fremantle Arts Centre Press
• Miller A The Crucible Penguin
• Paretsky S Tunnel vision: A V I Warshawski novel Hamish Hamilton

Recommended texts

• Bourdieu P Language and symbolic power Polity Press
• Fairclough N Language and power Longman
• Goodrich P Reading the law: A critical introduction to legal method and techniques Blackwell
• Graycar R and Morgan J The hidden gender of law Federation Press
• Pateman C The sexual contract Polity Press