Courses

The past decade has seen a steady increase in interdisciplinary scholarship interested in the relationships between literature and international law. Critical international legal scholars often invoke literature (and literary terms) to supplement their analyses, while many comparative literature scholars have attempted to discover what Pascale Casanova calls the “international laws” of literature. However, much of this scholarship remains deeply rooted in the home disciplines of the scholars, who not only operate with the prevailing assumptions and methodologies of their disciplines, but also tend to treat the other discipline as stable and unproblematic. Moreover, most of that scholarship has failed to take account of colonialism and imperialism in the formation of disciplinary knowledge—and, especially, in the formation of both international law and world literature.

International law is always produced in what Mary Louise Pratt has called “the contact zone.” Placing the history of colonialism at the center of inquiry, this course seeks to explore some of the many possible intersections between international law and comparative literature. We will examine some of the approaches that scholars have already taken, but we will also pursue new ways of thinking about how law and literature interact. The course focuses on a number of historical “events” to consider how literature and law both contribute to the logic of world-making and to the imagination of international orders.