What is the dynamic relationship between our culture's written and unwritten laws and its literature? How is that relationship evolving? How do law and literature influence or reflect one other? And what lessons might we draw from their symbiotic relationship? This 24-lecture series from a much-honored teacher approaches these questions with provocation and passion as it explores the rhetorical and philosophical connections that link these two disciplines, moving through ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, England's experience of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the 19th and 20th centuries. Focusing on individual works of literature where law - implicit or explicit - is a central theme, as well as on the overall relationship between law and literature in society, Professor Heinzelman shows how that relationship gradually transformed, from the astoundingly intricate cross-connections between law and literature still present during the time of Shakespeare, to a point in the mid-18th century when the two disciplines separated more clearly into the distinct realms we recognize today. The crucial period from the late 17th to the 19th century - during which that separation evolved and solidified - draws her sharpest focus, with the literature of the time, including some of the most famous and influential works ever put to paper, offering a profound perspective on that era's structures and values as well as an enduring impact we still feel today.
Representing Justice: Stores of Law and Literature
01: Literature as Law, Literature of Law
This introductory lecture explores the variable relationships between law and literature as deeply interconnected forms of storytelling and argues in favor of understanding both in terms of their larger cultural contexts - including not only of words, but also images, urban spaces, events, rituals, and social organizations.
02: The Old Testament as Law and Literature
We explore how the stories of the Old Testament narrated the history of God's chosen people and legislated how individuals and society should conduct their affairs in relation to God while making literature out of those contracts through myths.
03: Revenge and Justice in Aeschylus’s "Oresteia"
Aeschylus's trilogy of plays takes its audience through the most fundamental transformation in all of Western law: from the ancient savagery of blood feuding, still present in Homer's telling of these same stories, to the considered and reasoned examination of the two sides before a neutral jury.
04: Community in Sophocles’s "Oedipus Tyrannus"
We examine how mythology and the genre of tragedy in Sophocles's play represent a particular Greek view of the world and of man's relationship to the divine, and we see how the influence of Greek literature and philosophy still resonates in our own articulations of just retribution.
05: Ritual Order in Mystery and Morality Plays
This lecture turns from the ancient biblical and Greek sources of law to analyze a form of dramatic performance that emerged in Europe in the Middle Ages, drawing on the juridical and religious concepts of law found in the New Testament and the life of Christ to solidify shared cultural values across nations.
06: Chaucer’s Lawyers and Priests
We see how three tales from the medieval literary narrative "Canterbury Tales" illustrate once again the profound importance of biblical narrative and its role in constructing cultural values in the Middle Ages.
07: Inns of Court, Royal Courts, and the Stage
Great authors from Chaucer to Dickens learned law at the Inns of Court. We examine the extraordinarily dense network of political, religious, and aesthetic relationships and influences connecting the Inns of Court, the royal court, and English playhouses during the time of Shakespeare.
08: Shakespeare’s "Merchant of Venice" (1596–97)
"The Merchant of Venice" even now provokes passionate discussion about the anti-Semitic values it seems to condone. This lecture examines the arguments for and against this understanding of the play and looks at the rights and limitations of contract law on foreign citizens in England.
09: Shakespeare’s "Measure for Measure" (1603–04)
We explore a play that reflects the deep interest that the nature of moral and legal authority held for 17th-century citizens - and not only those in positions to enforce moral and legal regulations.
10: Shakespeare’s "The Winter’s Tale" (1609–11)
"The Winter's Tale" illustrates the inextricable connections between the patriarchy of the state and of the family, and the potential for both order and chaos that such a complex, interwoven system of law and morality sustains.
11: An Epic Trial—Milton’s "Paradise Lost" (1667)
This great epic of English literature illustrates the nature of the English Puritan state - itself another paradise whose loss Milton (who had been secretary to Oliver Cromwell) lamented and the complicated web of connections that linked Puritan theology, laws, and politics.
12: "Moll Flanders" (1722); "Beggar’s Opera" (1727)
In these two texts, a novel and a comic opera, we see how the moral influence of the church in social and political matters is challenged by the secular values of "the middling classes" and a growing mercantile economy.
13: Trial Tales of Parricide Mary Blandy (1752)
Novelist Henry Fielding wrote a popular account of a mid-18th-century "cause célèbre," the trial of Mary Blandy for the murder of her father. We will see how Fielding's narrative, the official trial report, and the defendant's own autobiography were mutually supportive and conflicting accounts.
14: Property and Self—Edgeworth, Burney, Austen
The lecture looks at the work of three women writers to examine how social constructs of class and gender are reflected in and produced by the law. For example, in "Pride and Prejudice," Jane Austen employs the conventions of the romance novel to explore the gender contradictions in the laws of inheritance and property.
15: Law as Fog—Dickens’s "Bleak House" (1852–53)
This novel addresses the flaws in the British legal system and also uses that system as a metaphor for the corruption, inhumanity, and gridlock of the social system.
16: Puritans Anew—"The Scarlet Letter" (1850)
Hawthorne, like Dickens, drew enormous inspiration from reading "Notable English Trials," remarking that he could spend four life times writing novels based on those cases. In this look into America's Puritan past, which is also a commentary on America's mid-19th century, we see a woman turn from shame and the alienation of her community to become an independent thinker, proto-feminist, and maternal figure to the women under the patriarchal regime that has condemned her.
17: Slavery and "Huckleberry Finn" (1885)
Published 20 years after the end of the Civil War, Mark Twain's novel is one of the most controversial ever published in America. It confronts the contorted moral philosophy that enabled those who believed themselves Christians to enslave other humans.
18: Victorian Limits—"Tess" and "Jude the Obscure"
In Thomas Hardy's self-described novels of "character and environment," the environment encompasses more than a physical setting; it includes the strict Victorian moral environment that, for both Tess and Jude, compounds the limitations of their natures.
19: Susan Glaspell’s “Jury of Her Peers” (1917)
This landmark short story explores the consequences of all-male juries sitting in judgment on women, a practice that persisted in the United States until passage of a law by Congress in 1968.
20: Kafka and 20th-Century Anxiety about Law
In his novels and short stories, Kafka portrays a world both realistic and dreamlike where individuals confront a sense that they are guilty and deserve punishment but can find no reason for their suffering.
21: "Lolita" (1958) and the Art of Confessing
This lecture examines a novel that has become part of the American cultural landscape, a confession in which the perversity of the narrator's crimes are matched only by the perversity and assumed duplicity of his narrative, a narrative that nevertheless urges us to try to understand him.
22: “Witnessing” Slavery in "Beloved" (1987)
Toni Morrison's novel examines the spiritual as well as the physical and political consequences of slavery, returning us to the relationship of law and religion.
23: Maternal Infanticide—Myth and Judgment
We look at the representation of maternal infanticide in literature and law, drawing on ancient and modern texts to explore the way in which we come to judgment about a crime that has been depicted as the most unnatural of all.
24: Literature and Law—Past, Present, Future
The relationship between literature and law today is in some ways similar to the situation in ancient Greece, where law was not an abstract system of rules but a live performance. Is the saturation of our media with law and law-related topics a healthy de-mystification of what was once an elite and hermetic enterprise and therefore something we should value as essentially American? Can law survive its popularity?
About
Dr. Susan Sage Heinzelman is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, where she has been teaching since 1977 in the English Department and in the School of Law. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario. Professor Heinzelman has won many university teaching awards, including the President's Associates Teaching Award (2003). She is president of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. She is coeditor (with Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman) of Representing Women: Law, Literature, and Feminism (1994) and author of many articles on the representation of women in law and literature, including ìBlack Letters and Black Rams: Fictionalizing Law and Legalizing Literature in Enlightenment Englandî in Law/Text/Culture (2002).
