Time Schedule:
Gillian H Harkins
ENGL 363
Seattle Campus
Relationships between literature and other arts, such as painting, photography, architecture, and music, or between literature and other disciplines, such as science. Content varies.
Class description
For AUTUMN 2007: Women, Law, and Literature. This course will explore the making and unmaking of “woman” as a legal category. Our exploration will take us across laws of the early empires and emerging nation-states, through the modern revolutions in legal thought of the nineteenth-century republics, and into the post-modern revaluation of women in legal regimes of the twentieth century. Our questions will focus on the deep imbrication of women and the law: how has the category woman been central to the idea of law itself? How do societies bound by the “rule of law” treat and traffic in women, and how does feminist critique expose the gendering work of law? With such a broad canvas, we will have to narrow our scope to begin seeing patterns and breaks in the worlding of law. Our focus on literature will allow us to touch down at specific points in the extension and restriction of law, using these turning points to examine transformations in labor, sentiment, femininity, racialization, sexuality, reproduction, and property. Our literary texts are likely to include Susan Rowson, The Coquette; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians; and Fae Mynne Ng, Bone. (Offered w. WOMEN 350, CHID 350)
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
