Law and literature: The existentialist novel

Are you a reader? Interested in the connection between law and fiction? Sharpen your interpretive skills and explore what existential literature has to say about the law and self-formation as we read classics by writers including Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus and Ishiguro in “Law and Literature: The Existential Novel.” In this course, we will examine the transformation of human agency under the pressure of legal personhood. A standard view of the genre might read the law as representative of arbitrary, totalizing and anonymous systems at odds with ideals of human freedom, expression and individual will. However, we will ask to what extent individuality and personal freedom are not only repressed by but forged from within these systems in the existentialist novel, allowing their authors to imagine the power of the law to frame individual exceptionalism through the very mechanisms meant to erase it.