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Law in Literature (LAW-RT-LAWLIT-26)

LAW-RT-LAWLIT-26

Description

Overall concept

The course introduces participants to the interdisciplinary field “Law and Literature”. The focus of the seminar will lie on “law in literature” and prepare the participants to engage with the entire range of debates in the field. This course chooses to emphasize literary representations of law, as this approach offers participants the opportunity to engage directly with non-legal texts, which they might otherwise not be exposed to in an academic capacity,. Through close reading and discussion, participants will explore how literature reflects, critiques, and (re-)imagines law, justice, authority, and punishment. The analytical tools developed this way, can subsequently be applied to legal materials and the participant’s own research. The course combines theoretical and practical engagement with Law and Literature. Participants will be introduced to key debates within the field, including questions concerning the relationship between law and narrative, the nature of interpretation, and competing understandings of law and literature as social and cultural practices. These discussions will be based on a close analysis of literary texts and their representations of legal institutions and authority. To facilitate sustained engagement with literary works, the course is designed to span the academic year. It will consist of six sessions organised into three thematic blocks. The first thematic block introduces participants to Law and Literature scholarship and familiarises them with basic concepts from literary theory. This provides the methodological foundation for the subsequent thematic blocks, which focus on two novels: Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. The Trial is one of the most discussed literary texts in Law and Literature scholarship and beyond. Its extensive secondary literature also enables participants to engage with established scholarly debates in the field. In contrast, The Hunger Games represents a contemporary and less frequently studied example that raises questions about power, rule enforcement and legitimacy. Reading these works together demonstrates both the breadth of literary engagement with legal themes and the value of examining legal questions across different literary genres and cultural contexts. The course is valuable to participants in several respects. It develops interdisciplinary research skills by introducing methods and debates from literary studies and encouraging participants to apply them to legal questions. It also strengthens critical reading, interpretation, and analytical reasoning. More broadly, the course highlights law as a cultural phenomenon and therefore complements existing research within the Law Department, particularly in areas such as law and society and legal theory. The course is designed to be accessible across disciplines and may therefore also be of interest to researchers from other departments.

Pedagogy and assessment
The course aims at allowing the participants to get practical experience in thinking about the law through the lens of literary works. For this, it is necessary that the participants familiarise themselves thoroughly with the primary sources we are going to discuss. The mandatory readings are therefore all literary texts. All secondary sources or works on theory are supplementary readings. The lecturers will teach their content in class. This aims at familiarizing all the participants with the broad debates in literary theory and law in literature and allow them to apply the knowledge in practice. The participants to connect them back to the primary literature that was assigned with guidance from the instructors. This means that the course includes parts of traditional teaching, where the instructors explain concepts and debates in class. The participants are encouraged to engage in genuine debates about the representation of law in literature. They will be asked to pay attention during class to whether any of the other particpants holds views that are conflicting with theirs. For the final assignment, they will be asked to pair up and write a 500 to 1000-word paper in which they discuss one of the topics from the class and take a view that is different from their partner's.

First, Second & Third Term: registration from 21 to 25 September 2026

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