Below is the sixth installment in the lecture series on literary theory and criticism by Paul H. Fry. The three two lectures are here, here, here, here, and here.
Posts Tagged ‘Pedagogy’
Paul H. Fry’s “The New Criticism and Other Western Formalisms”
In Academia, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Communication, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Poetry, Rhetoric, Scholarship, The Academy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on May 28, 2014 at 8:45 amPaul H. Fry’s “The Idea of the Autonomous Artwork”
In Academia, American Literature, Art, Arts & Letters, Books, British Literature, Creativity, Essays, Fiction, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Novels, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Scholarship, Teaching, The Academy, Western Philosophy, Writing on May 21, 2014 at 8:45 amReview of “Teaching Law and Literature”
In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Fiction, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Law-and-Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, News and Current Events, Novels, Pedagogy, Teaching, Writing on April 24, 2012 at 8:33 am
Teaching Law and Literature. Austin Sarat, Cathrine O. Frank, and Matthew Anderson, eds. New York: Modern Language Association, 2011. vii + 507 pp. $25, paper.
What began as a coordinated, idiosyncratic project in American and British law schools has become a common component of curricula in English departments across the globe. Law and literature as a subject and as a movement has gained purchase over the last three decades. Inaugurated in 1973 with the publication of James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination, which highlighted, among other things, the affinities between legal and literary rhetoric, law and literature has splintered into so many narrowed foci that today it is just as common to see courses like “Law in Late 19th Century American Literature” as it once was to see courses called, quite simply and broadly, “Law and Literature.”
To celebrate and explain this movement, The Modern Language Association (MLA) has released Teaching Law and Literature, an edition with forty-one essays by some of the most prominent scholars in the field, including none other than White himself. Although law and literature has enjoyed ample funding and has become the subject of an increasing number of journals and conferences, not enough work has been done on the pedagogical aspects of the discipline. Put another way, the discipline has yet adequately to address the question of how professors ought to teach the interplay of law and literature to students.
That is a gap that this book seeks to fill. According to editors Austin Sarat, Cathrine O. Frank, and Matthew Anderson, Teaching Law and Literature “provides a resource for teachers interested in learning about the field of law and literature and how to bring its insights to bear in their classrooms, both in the liberal arts and in law schools.” Despite that stated goal, the book is weighted toward undergraduate education, and the editors admit as much in their introduction.
At a time when American law schools are under fire for admissions scandals and fabricated data, professors of law and literature—and law professors interested in humanistic and jurisprudential approaches to law teaching—would do well to turn their attention to undergraduates. When budget cuts and faculty purging befall the legal academy, as they likely will, law and literature (and its various offshoots) will be the first curricular elective to suffer. A discipline whose proponents struggle to articulate its purpose—will a course in law and literature help law students to pass a bar exam or to become better lawyers?—may not survive the institutional scrutiny of deans, administrators, and alumni associations.
Yet it is the urgent quest for validation that makes law and literature such an important subject. At its core, law and literature is about grand questions: Why study literature at all? What use do novels, plays, poems, and the like have for the general public and for the practical, workaday world in which lawyers serve a necessary function? Might the recurring themes of justice, fairness, and equality expressed in canonized texts from disparate cultures and communities point to something recognizable and distinctive in the human condition? And are there paralyzing limits to specialized knowledge of periods and genres when so many law and literature scholars, working out of different traditions and trained in supposedly autonomous disciplines, arrive at the same or similar generalizations regarding human experience?
One such generalization, interestingly enough, is that complicated relationships between people—whether based in race, gender, class, or whatever—ought to be understood in terms of ambiguity and contingency rather than certainty and absolutes, and that simple answers will hardly ever suffice to illuminate the nuances and contradictions of any given phenomenon, especially law. That law is too often reduced to blackletter, blanket rules is not lost to writers of imaginative literature, who, many of them, have used law and legal institutions to enable critiques and explorations of complex social and philosophical problems.
It is little wonder, in light of the compatibility between literary and legal rhetoric or hermeneutics, that a Maryland appellate judge recently wrote in his concurrence that “[t]his case is E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India all over again. Something happened up there at the Marabar Caves. Was it an attempted rape? Was it some form of hysteria triggered by strongly ambivalent emotions imploding violently in a dark and isolated catacomb? Or was it some unmappable combination of the two as moods and signals shifted diametrically in mid-passage? The outside world will never know.” Here is a judge employing a work of literature to demonstrate a point about the limitations of human knowledge. Law provides topoi in countless works of literature, and works of literature, as this judge apparently recognizes, can supply context and profundity to the deforming routines and desensitizing rituals of everyday law practice. Without following the judge through to the end of his reasoning, one can sense in his lines a stark awareness of the incapacity of human faculties and hence the perspectival nature of what the philosophers call “justice.” Read the rest of this entry »
Teaching Style
In Arts & Letters, Communication, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Teaching, Writing on November 16, 2011 at 10:13 am
In his essay “Teaching Style: A Possible Anatomy,” Winston Weathers mentions a “definite exercise system” whereby students learn to mimic stylistic writing models. This exercise recalls writing emulation activities that were popular in late 19th and early 20th century America. Recently, I have conducted some “emulation exercises” in my classes.
I had students compare Natalia Ginsburg’s “He and I” with the draft of an essay by Michael Blumenthal (whom I met during law school and who was kind enough to show my students what a professional writer’s “rough” draft looks like). Then the students undertook an exercise. They picked out their favorite sentences, which were mostly the sentences they thought were the most “stylistic.” The students wrote these sentences on the board. They erased all the words in the sentence so that only punctuation remained. Finally, they inserted their own words where the authors’ had been, maintaining the integrity of the sentence structure (i.e., the punctuation) but conveying an entirely different message. After doing this with several sentences, my students, some of them at least, began to see how professional authors use colons, dashes, and semi-colons. They began to see how professional authors use different styles. I believe they also learned ways to experiment with syntax.
To employ Weathers’s wording, I hope the students learned “(1) how to recognize stylistic material, (2) how to transfer this stylistic material and make it a part of compositional technique, (3) how to combine stylistic materials into particular stylistic modes, and (4) how to adapt particular stylistic modes to particular rhetorical situations” (369). I’m not sure my exercise provided much guidance as to # 4, but it seemed to teach the lessons of # 1, # 2, and # 3.
Since I gave this exercise, I’ve noticed one sign of improvement among my students: they have become better readers. They know, for instance, what style they like. Some students preferred Ginsburg’s style to Blumenthal’s, and vice versa. At first, they weren’t sure why, but after the exercise, they slowly gained a sense of why they liked one more than the other. One student claimed that Ginsburg’s piece was a faster read because it had fewer commas. This student preferred short, matter-of-fact sentences with a quick rhythm. I don’t think he realized this preference until he did the exercise. I later gave this student a Hemingway passage and asked, “Is this the style you like?” The student said that, indeed, this was the style he liked, and also that he was afraid that my reading assignments were encouraging students to write sentences in a New Yorker style: long, meandering, and comma-heavy. This last comment was interesting on many levels.
Writing instructors ought to teach or at least encourage style.
Style is important; style can be cultivated.
For further reading, see Winston Weathers, “Teaching Style: A Possible Anatomy,” in The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook, Fourth Edition. Edited by Edward P. J. Corbett, Nancy Meyers and Gary Tate (Oxford University Press, 1999).
Habermas for Law Professors
In Art, Arts & Letters, Communication, Creativity, Essays, Ethics, Habermas, Humanities, Information Design, Jurisprudence, Law, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Legal Research & Writing, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Teaching, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on November 4, 2011 at 3:12 pm
This post is an adaptation of this printable, PDF document.
This post is intended to assist law professors who wish to incorporate critical theory (in general) and Habermas (in particular) into their teaching. This post addresses just one essay by Habermas that is representative of his thought. It does not address other important areas of Habermasian theory such as the “public sphere” (a concept that the essay nevertheless implicates).
This post should provide some basic insights into Habermas that could be incorporated into a law school classroom. Contracts in particular would benefit from Habermasian analyses, which could just as constructively be applied to torts, evidence, constitutional law, or any course dealing with litigation and the courtroom. This post provides basic information. It does not tell law professors how to use the information. The use will require creativity.
Fundamental to the paradigm of mutual understanding is … the performative attitude of participants in interaction, who coordinate their plans for action by coming to an understanding about something in the world. When ego carries out a speech act and alter takes up a position with regard to it, the two parties enter into an interpersonal relationship. The latter is structured by the system of reciprocally interlocked perspectives among speakers, hearers, and non-participants who happen to be present at the time.
—Jürgen Habermas, “An Alternative Way Out of the Philosophy of the Subject”[1]
In a way, “An Alternative Way Out of the Philosophy of the Subject” is a response to Foucault’s theories of subjectivity that treat subjects as produced by forces of power. Habermas seems to consider Foucault’s theories as so preoccupied with knowledge formation and structural preconditions for knowledge formation that they (the theories) become pseudoscience abstracted from practical realities. A Foucaultian paradigm centers on subjectivity trained by mechanical forces whereas a Habermasian paradigm explores communicative reason in the context of discourse enabled by the ideations of individual subjects articulating their positions to one another in mutually intelligible utterances.
Contra Foucault, Habermas submits that reason—articulated, assimilated, and mediated by language—must be understood as social. For social interaction to be meaningful, its interlocutors must believe that their articulations are objectively “true” or sincere (I place “true” in quotations because the “pragmatically expanded theory of meaning overcomes [the] fixation on the fact-mirroring function of language”). Speech must be governed by points of common understanding. These points are reached when “ego carries out a speech act and alter takes up a position with regard to it.” Ego, here, refers to a person’s conscious awareness that is capable of being conveyed in speech. “Alter” does not refer to alter ego, but to some agent outside the subjective world of cognition, intention, and belief. This “alter” is part of the external or objective world to which the ego can articulate feelings or thoughts, provided that ego and alter have in common a familiar discursive space (a lifeworld) for their subjective expressions. By this reading, alter has an ego, and ego can be an alter. The terms simply depend upon which subject is articulating his position in a given speech situation; the terms are merely descriptive.
To claim that we can comprehend events or things in the world is to suggest that we can speak about them. To speak about events or things in the world is to convey information about them from one party to another using shared vocabularies governed by rules that the parties accept unconditionally. The interpersonal relationship among or between parties, as Habermas suggests, is “structured by the system of reciprocally interlocked perspectives.” The study of this relationship brings Habermas further away from the Foucaultian paradigms of subjectivity and towards the paradigm of mutual understanding that has come to mark Habermasian thought. Read the rest of this entry »
Teaching Audience
In Arts & Letters, Communication, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Teaching, Writing on October 21, 2011 at 12:04 pm
The following post comes from a journal entry I wrote to myself in the fall of 2010. The post addresses the importance of audience to writing, and more specifically to the teaching of writing. Other posts on this site have addressed this topic: see here, here, here, here, and here.
I’m sitting here at a small wooden desk in my hotel in Destin, Florida, beneath a window that overlooks crowded parking lots, ivy-lined tennis courts, swaying palm trees, and beyond all these, white sand and an emerald-blue ocean. I haven’t shaved all weekend. I’m slightly sunburned. I feel refreshed, except that Giuliana keeps insisting I get a haircut before I head back to Auburn and she to Atlanta. Instead of walking the beach with her, I’m reading The History of the Kings of Britain and considering what I’ll teach my college freshmen this week.
I’ve skimmed my syllabus and revisited each underlined phrase and barely legible marginalia from my teaching notes, and now I’m considering a line by Douglas B. Park. It says, “Locating and discussing the audience for a given piece of prose can be frustrating.”
Indeed it can. Just this week I gave my students an assignment that I hoped would teach a thing or two about audience. I handed out two pieces of paper on which I had copied and pasted three articles about Cancun, Mexico.
I had drawn the first article from the website of a tourist agency, the second from a newspaper, and the third from a literary journal. I asked my students the same question that Park posed to his students: “Who or what. . . is the audience for this piece?”
My students replied that tourists—surprise, surprise!—were the targeted audience for article one (perhaps “brochure” is a better term than “article”). But they couldn’t name the audience for the second and third articles. They responded with things like “the general public” or “the average reader,” categories so broad as to lack any clear referent. So I tried, without really knowing what I was doing, asking something like Park’s next question: “How does audience manifest itself to writers writing?”
I think I put the question more simply: “What’s the point of each piece?”
Perhaps stuck on the first brochure, my students answered, “To persuade you to go to Cancun.”
I was making progress, but not enough.
“How,” I asked, “does the article accomplish that?”
One student said, “By bolding words like ‘vacation,’ ‘beach,’ and ‘fun.’”
“What could make this article more effective?” I said.
One student, in so many words, said, “More adjectives. Some pictures. Maybe a story or two.”
The students seemed to “get” article one. But articles two and three were harder to pin down. When I repeated my question—“Who is the audience for this piece?”—the students said something like “smart people.”
Not until this weekend did I realize why my exercise failed. The failure had something to do with Park’s claim that in the “case of unstructured situations where we would call the audience ‘general,’ where no simple, concrete identifications of audience are possible, the whole concept [of audience] becomes much more elusive.”
Articles two and three were elusive. Or maybe my exercise for articles two and three was elusive because it created an unstructured situation.
What documents could I have used to show how different kinds of writings signal different audiences?
One problem with my activity was that even I couldn’t determine the intended audience for articles two and three. Presumably there were several audiences. The point of advertising, after all, is to appeal to as many audiences as possible.
To satisfy my students, I lumped together articles two and three and said something like, “Now you see how a persuasive piece is different from leisure reading or newspaper reading.”
That was that. My activity failed. I learned, however, about what Park calls the “elusiveness of audience in written discourse.” I learned that I needed a better exercise to show my students how to anticipate their audiences. Read the rest of this entry »
What is a Research Paper, and How Does It Implicate Disciplinarity?
In Arts & Letters, Communication, Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Legal Research & Writing, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Teaching, Writing on September 8, 2011 at 10:51 pm
Richard L. Larson interrogates the “research paper” signifier. He claims that this signifier lacks settled meaning because it “has no conceptual or substantive identity” (218). He calls the term “generic” and “cross-disciplinary” and claims that it “has virtually no value as an identification of a kind of substance in a paper” (218). Despite its empty or fluid meaning, the term “research paper” persists inside and outside English Departments, among faculty and students, at both university and secondary school levels. The problem for Larson is that by perpetuating the use of this slippery signifier, writing instructors mislead students as to what constitutes research and thereby enable bad research.
The term research paper “implicitly equates ‘research’ with looking up books in the library and taking down information from those books” (218); therefore, students learning to write so-called research papers inadvertently narrow their research possibilities by relying on a narrow conception of research as library visitation, note-taking, or whatever, without recognizing other forms of research that may be more discipline-appropriate: interviews, field observations, and the like (218). Using the term “research paper” to describe a particular type of activity implies not only that other, suitable practices are not in fact “research,” but also that students may dispense with elements of logic and citation if their instructors didn’t call the assignment a “research paper.” Really, though, research papers teach skills that apply to all papers, regardless of whether instructors designate a paper as “research.” In a way, all papers are research papers if they draw from sustained observation or studied experience.
Having argued that the term research paper is a vacant signifier—vacant of identity if not of meaning (not that the two are mutually exclusive)—Larson argues that the “provincialism” (220) of writing instructors (by which he means writing instructors’ presumption that they can and should speak across disciplines despite their lack of formal training in other disciplines) leads to a problem of territoriality. Some information belongs in the province of other disciplines, Larson seems to suggest, and writing instructors should not assume that they know enough about other disciplines to communicate in a discipline-appropriate setting. Some knowledge, in other words, lies outside the writing instructor’s jurisdiction. I’m ambivalent on this score. Read the rest of this entry »
Note from a Reader: An Article about Leaders in Legal Education
In Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Legal Research & Writing, Pedagogy, Teaching on August 2, 2011 at 11:46 am
A loyal reader of this site has suggested that I post a link to this article about 10 leaders in legal education. I’m happy to do so. I’m curious what other readers think of the list.
Although I’ve posted the list below, I encourage readers to click on the link above to see why these leaders were chosen.
1. Massachusetts School of Law, Andover
4. Association of American Law Schools
6. David Lat
7. George Leef
8. Susan Sturm and Lani Guinier
9. Bryan Garner
10. Stephen R. Marsh
Teaching Bioethics From a Legal Perspective
In Advocacy, Arts & Letters, Bioethics, Communication, Creative Writing, Creativity, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, News and Current Events, Pedagogy, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Teaching, Writing on July 6, 2011 at 8:33 pm
Last fall, I was assigned to teach a course called “Health & Medicine.” Because I know little about health or medicine, I was concerned. The subject of the course was writing, so I decided to craft a syllabus to facilitate classroom discussion and textual argument. Here is the course description as stated on my syllabus:
Forensic discourse is one of three forms of classical rhetoric as defined by Aristotle. It focuses on the relationship between language and law. This semester we will explore forensic discourse in the context of health and medicine and consider the relationship of law to such issues as physician assisted suicide, surrogacy, cloning, informed consent, malpractice, and organ transplants. Readings on ethics and philosophy will inform the way you think about these issues.
Your grade will not depend on how much you learn about law, but on how you use language to argue about and with law. Because the facts of any case are rarely clear-cut, you will need to understand both sides of every argument. Your writing assignments will require you to argue on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants (or prosecutors and defendants) and to rebut the arguments of opposing counsel. You will develop different tactics for persuading your audience (judges, attorneys, etc.), and you will become skilled in the art of influence.
During the semester, your class will interview one attorney, one judge, and one justice sitting on the Supreme Court of Alabama.
My students came from mostly nursing and pre-medical backgrounds. A few were science majors of some kind, and at least two were engineering majors.
The students were also at varying stages in their academic progress: some were freshmen, some were sophomores, two were juniors, and at least one was a senior. Throughout the semester, I was impressed by students’ ability to extract important issues from dense legal readings and articulate complicated reasoning in nuanced and intelligent ways.
I thought about this “Health & Medicine” class this week when I came across this article published by the Brookings Institution. The title of the article is “The Problems and Possibilities of Modern Genetics: A Paradigm for Social, Ethical, and Political Analysis.” The authors are Eric Cohen and Robert P. George. Cohen is editor of The New Atlantis and an adjunct fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals & Institutions, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Read the rest of this entry »
Adam’s Rib and the “Two-Worlds” Problem
In Arts & Letters, Communication, Film, Humanities, Information Design, Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Shakespeare, Teaching on June 29, 2011 at 1:28 pm
Directed by George Cukor, the film Adam’s Rib tells the story of Adam (Spencer Tracy) and Amanda Bonner (Katharine Hepburn), New York attorneys whose marriage smacks of “tough love.” The couple square off when Adam is assigned to prosecute a woman (Judy Holliday) who has attempted to murder her philandering husband—a bumbling dweeb—in the apartment of his mistress. Amanda, who approves of the woman’s act, which she views as resistance to patriarchal society, takes up the case as defense counsel.
Genesis tells us that God fashioned Adam from dust, Eve from Adam’s rib. Adam’s Rib tells a different story.
If anything, Amanda, or “Eve,” is the starting-point—a source of controversy, inspiration, and curiosity. Adam’s Rib isn’t the first production to render gender contests in comedic tones—it’s part of a tradition dating back at least to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew or Fletcher’s Tamer Tamed, and probably much further—but it is one of the more remarkable of all twentieth-century productions, especially in light of Amanda’s advocacy for a doctrine that, in American family law, came to be known as “formal equality.”
What, exactly, does Adam’s Rib offer law students? What does it teach law students, and why should law professors bother with it?
A film that’s in no way after verisimilitude is unlikely to teach law students how to file motions, write briefs, analyze statutes, or bill clients—tasks that we assume are requisite to becoming “good” lawyers. So what’s the point?
In his cunning way, James Elkins, during his Lawyers & Film course that I took in law school, responded to questions of this variety by drawing two boxes on the blackboard: one representing law, the other film.
“We’ve gotta get from this box to this box,” he explained, retracing the diagram with the tip of his chalk. “One place to start,” he suggested, “is with the movie scenes depicting lawyers or the courtroom.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities 