ENG 486 - Seminar: Special Topics

Instructor

Kuzmanovich

English 486: Law, Literature, and Film: The Narrative Structure of Trials
 
Law, Literature, and Film: The Narrative Structure of Trials builds off and borrows heavily from the monumental Legal Fictions seminar taught by Prof. Randy Nelson before his retirement in 2018.  Prof. Nelson’s course started from the premise that “a trial is a text that can be read in much the same way that any other text can be read.  Indeed, modern trials are in effect telling contests, with two competing ‘narrators’ telling two versions of the same story to a captive audience.  Understanding how, when, and to whom this story can be told takes some effort, however, because the language of trials is not the same as literary language and the conventions of legal storytelling are not literary conventions.”  

We will keep Prof. Nelson’s emphasis on contemporary literary theory as it applies to courtroom proceedings/narratives, and we will study several of those courtroom narratives by observing real trials in the Mecklenburg County Superior Court. Please familiarize yourself with the functioning of this court:   Mecklenburg County | North Carolina Judicial Branch (nccourts.gov). The course  textbooks will include  transcripts of real trials to complement literary trials.  I will add film to literature and arrange the course in thematic units on the trial as a story and as criminal procedure(Billy Budd, The Trial).  Those thematic units will include 
(1) show trials (The Crucible + local trials you select), 
(2) crime and emotion/crime of passion/insanity plea  (Anatomy of a Murder, Primal Fear ), 
(3) the nature of punishment (Merchant of Venice),  
(4) women and the law (Civil Action, The Music Box),
(4) race, equal justice,  and representation (Amistad/”Benito Cereno”/O.J. Simpson),  
(5) law and ethics (analysis of Supreme Court decisions and minority opinions,  
(6) censorship (portions of Ulysses, Women in Love, and Tampa (Florida vs. LaFave),  
(7) the rhetoric of law and of (scientific) evidence (a CSI episode),   
(8) the styles of dissent in judicial opinions (Cardozo, Kerr, Tushnet).  We will also spend some times on 
(10) cyber crimes and cyber evidence, starting with Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back” episode. 

Instructor
Churchill

Navigating the Avant-Garde: Mina Loy and Her Nework

The emergence of the avant-garde in the early 20th century coincided with an explosion in magazines. Between 1885 and 1905 alone, 7500 new periodicals were established in the U. S., and thousands more in Great Britain. This seminar will explore the avant-garde as it circulated through magazines, ranging from experimental “little magazines” to “quality” monthlies and the mass-market glossies and pulps. Mina Loy’s “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” appeared in The Dial in 1922, the same year that T. S. Eliot published “The Waste Land” in the same journal and James Joyce’s Ulysses was serialized in The Little Review. By the 1920s, avant-garde writers had become celebrities, featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair.

The central node the seminar’s inquiry will be Mina Loy-an artist, writer, feminist, inventor, and entrepreneur who moved in the circles of Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, and migrated among metropolitan centers of avant-garde activity, including Paris, Florence, Rome, New York, London, and Berlin, from the 1910s to the 1950s. Since Loy played a role in almost every major avant-garde movement, we will explore and map the avant-garde networks she navigated, using magazines to chart lines of connection and influence.

Just as the avant-garde began with an explosion of new print media, you will enter the field of new digital media, operating your own Davidson Domain and using WordPress, Google Docs and Google Drive, as well as mapping and timeline tools-skills you can market in job, fellowship, and employment applications, along with your experience working on a team. The seminar is a collaborative research & methods course with readings drawn from the field of periodical studies. You will find and select many of primary source readings, collaborate on a major research project, and contribute to the expansion of the web site Index of Modernist Magazines: a select bibliography. In addition, your digital scholarship may be published on the scholarly website, Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde (mina-loy.com).

Prerequisite: Desire to study the past, eagerness to equip yourself for the future, willingness to take risks, and team spirit.