Instructor: J. Peters
*See English Department website for application instructions
This course investigates both representations of law in performance, film, and other media, and legal events as, themselves, media performances. In so doing, it explores the impact of film and other media on the shaping of law, and the way in which media attempt to rewrite law, offering an alternative sphere of judgment. Reading a number of theoretical and historical texts, and viewing films, television episodes, and other media texts, we will look at the ways in which the legal subject is both produced and understood through media texts, looking at how these are crucial to ideas about intention, the “reasonable man,” and the normal (cultural, sexual, violent normalities…). We will look at the performance of policing, the trial, punishment, and torture (both live and reflected through media). Along the way, we will look at the way in which film and other media inflect such substantive issues as the nature of murder and culpability, freedom of speech, sex offence, the cultural defense, justice after atrocity. The course will offer a theoretical foundation for thinking about the intersection of law and media, bringing legal, film, performance, and media theory into conversation with one another. More generally, the course will serve as a vehicle for interrogating “law and literature” and “law and media” as sub-disciplines, and for developing techniques for the interpretation of visual, filmed, and live “texts.”
