ENH4190

Legal fictions: intersections between law and literature

Proposed to be offered next in 1999

T Threadgold

12 points
* 2 hours per week
* Second semester
* Clayton

Objectives Students successfully completing this subject should have developed an understanding of critical discourse analysis, poststructuralist and feminist theory sufficient to enable them to use these in the analysis of representations of legal issues in media, literary and legal texts. They should have developed an understanding of the registers and genres of legal writing and speech and be able to think critically about the relationships between disciplines and genres.

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 contempoary 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 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 T 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
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
Pateman C The sexual contract Polity Press