Law, Jurisp & Social Thought 239 - Judgment and the Novel

This course approaches the problem of judgment and narrative in the context of a “crisis of judgment” that plagued the eighteenth-century novel and returned in the twentieth century. In this crisis, we see either a suspension of judgment (judgment is withheld, deemed condemnatory, moralizing, idiosyncratic) or an insistence that judgment be reached objectively, scientifically, or we see it as simply necessary. The novel stages and complicates this crisis. We will ask whether novels teach readers how to judge others or complicate and forestall judgment? In the first part of the course, we will look at other responses to the crisis of judgment, such as aesthetic and legal responses. We will think about what goes into a judgment; what makes a judgment legitimate; whether judgments even should be objective or intuitive; and what problems are posed by judicial discretion and precedent. We will read these in the context of historical work on common law legal judgment, record-keeping and stare decisis. We then turn back to the eighteenth century to broach the problem of judgment in moral and aesthetic writings. We will consider some major, but relatively short novels (that might include Haywood’s Fantomina: Or, Love in a Maze, Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Austen’s Emma, Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Brown’s Wieland and, more recently, McEwan’s Saturday and St. Aubin’s Never Mind) with a view to how they stage the interrelated problems of judgment, subjectivity, and autonomy.

Limited to 30 students.  Fall semester.  Visiting Professor Youssef.