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Posts Tagged ‘Huckleberry Finn’

Anil’s Ghost, Baudrillard, Billy Budd, Disgrace, Flaubert, Gilbert and Sullivan, Huckleberry Finn, Jonathan Kertzer, justice, law, Law and Literature, Nietzsche, Poetic Justice and Legal Fictions, The African Queen, Wallace Stevens

Book Note: Poetic Justice and Legal Fictions, by Jonathan Kertzer

In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Justice, Law, Law-and-Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Writing on September 28, 2012 at 8:45 am

The following excerpt first appeared as part of the Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies series.

This book is a compilation of literary essays that at first blush seem to have no through line save for an attention to law in the abstract. Nevertheless, each chapter is connected by the theme of justice and the relation of language to both law and literature.

Á la Flaubert, the book treats justice as the supreme literary value, and it distinguishes between the justice of literature and the literariness of justice. Language has its own jurisdiction and can be used judiciously, and the author seems to believe that signifiers can represent the phenomenal world in ways that have a practical bearing in law. By the same token, language itself is regulated by laws even as it enacts laws. The author discusses literary justice as a poetic expression of the material world.

The phrase “poetic justice” refers to the possibility that poetry might offer something better than truth in order to bring about justice; the truly poetic is just. Genre and jurisdiction resemble one another in their conceptual claims to authority or law.

Beginning with judicial discourse in comedies, more specifically with the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, the book moves through Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Disgrace, Huckleberry Finn, The African Queen, Billy Budd, the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Anil’s Ghost, and other works. The book therefore does not limit itself to discussion of a particular historical period, a fixed geography, or a specific genre. Rather, it weaves together a wide range of novelists, theorists, and historical figures, many of whom are unlikely to be categorized together were it not for their interests (some longstanding, some fleeting) in law.

What allows the book to read as a unified whole is its analysis at the intersections of justice, law, and literary forms.

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A River Runs Through It, Auburn University, “Once More to the Lake”, “Self-Reliance”, “Song of Myself”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Billy Budd, Character and Opinion in the United States, David Shi, E.B. White, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, F. O. Matthiessen, George Santayana, Gordon Wood, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Huckleberry Finn, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jack London, Janise Ray, John Hasnas, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, nature, Norman Maclean, Notes on the State of Virginia, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, Sustainability, Teaching, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy, The House of Seven Gables, The Simple Life, The Souls of Black Folk, The Travels of William Bartram, Thomas Jefferson, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, W. E. B. Dubois, Walden, Walt Whitman, White Fang, William Bartram, Writing

How I Taught Sustainability

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Emerson, Fiction, Humanities, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Teaching, Writing on January 9, 2012 at 1:12 am

Last spring I learned that I had been assigned to teach a freshman writing course on sustainability. I don’t know much about sustainability, at least not in the currently popular sense of that term, and for many other reasons I was not thrilled about having to teach this course. So I decided to put a spin on the subject. What follows is an abridged version of my syllabus. I owe more than a little gratitude to John Hasnas for the sections called “The Classroom Experience,” “Present and Prepared Policy,” and “Ground Rules for Discussion.” He created these policies, and, with a few exceptions, the language from these policies is taken from a syllabus he provided during a workshop at a July 2011 Institute for Humane Studies conference on teaching and pedagogy.

Sustainability and American Communities

What is sustainability? You have registered for this course about sustainability, so presumably you have some notion of what sustainability means. The Oxford English Dictionary treats “sustainability” as a derivative of “sustainable,” which is defined as

Capable of being borne or endured; supportable, bearable.
Capable of being upheld or defended; maintainable.
Capable of being maintained at a certain rate or level.

Recently, though, sustainability has become associated with ecology and the environment. The OED dates this development as beginning in 1980 and trending during the 1990s. The OED also defines “sustainability” in the ecological context as follows: “Of, relating to, or designating forms of human economic activity and culture that do not lead to environmental degradation, esp. avoiding the long-term depletion of natural resources.” With this definition in mind, we will examine landmark American authors and texts and discuss their relationship to sustainability. You will read William Bartram, Thomas Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Mark Twain, and others. Our readings will address nature, community, place, stewardship, husbandry, and other concepts related to sustainability. By the end of the course, you will have refined your understanding of sustainability through the study of literary texts.

Course Objectives

I have designed this course to help you improve your reading, writing, and thinking skills. In this course, you will learn to write prose for general, academic, and professional audiences. ENGL 1120 is a writing course, not a lecture course. Plan to work on your writing every night. You will have writing assignments every week. Read the rest of this entry »