Repères culturels

Contextualizing Supreme Court Decisions: Revisiting Major Societal Shifts through the Prism of US Fiction, from the 19^th Century to the Present

1. A brief introduction on Mimesis and literature’s potential to relate and reflect historical events, and more simply facts. This course will then focus on numerous works of fiction contextualizing and referring to the following topics (chronologically following the Supreme Court’s decisions studied in Mr. Labarre’s course):
2. Slavery (Dredd Scott v. Sandford)
3. Segregation (Plessy v. Ferguson)
4. The New Deal
5. Interracial Marriage and Race Relations in the US (Loving V. Virginia)
6. The Pentagon Papers and the Freedom of the Press (New York Times v. United States)
7. The Limits of Free Speech (Texas v. Johnson)
8. Culture and Political Wars in Contemporary US (Bush v. Gore/Citizens United v. FEC)
9. Same-sex Marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges)
10. Covid-19 and Mask Mandates (Lucas Wall, et al. v. Transportation Security Administration)

Session 1 :

Étudiants régime général et  régime spécial : Contrôle terminal : QCM en ligne 30 mn

Session 2 (« rattrapage ») :

Étudiants régime général et régime spécial: QCM en ligne 30 mn

Organisation des enseignements

12 séances de CM de 1 heure hebdomadaire.

Ouvrages au programme :

This lecture will conjure up numerous works of fiction considering the vast thematic and historical spectrum studied, from cultural landmarks such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin (but also on the same topic the much more recent The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead) to Philip Roth’s American Trilogy and, on Covid-19, Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends (2022), to give just a few examples.

Bibliographie complémentaire :

• Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
• Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory