The seminar will focus on property in law and literature. Fair warning: the course will involve considerable reading. We will read several novels, alongside law review articles and works of literary criticism, that explore the centrality of questions of property in law, literature, and culture. Representative topics include property and personhood, property in persons and things, property rights and the public interest, and property relations, both familial (marriage, primogenture, inheritance) and social. By critically examining how property is conceptualized in law and imagined in literature, we will see how literature uses or responds to legal structures, themes, and analytical techniques, and vice versa.
Representative literary texts likely to include: Toni Morrison, Beloved; Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; E.M. Forster, Howard's End; Zadie Smith, On Beauty.
Haynes, Kevin V.