RMPP 2023-2025: Directions and Dead Ends in the “Law and Literature” Movement
Dr. Philip Kaisary is the 2023–25 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor in Cultural Mediations and an Associate Professor in the Department of Law & Legal Studies, the Department of English Language and Literature, and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. His current research comprises a critique of the ‘Law and Literature’ movement and a proposal for the field’s reconstruction along more globally inclusive and materialist lines.
When it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, the interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature cast itself as a “movement.” Professor Philip Kaisary’s 2023–25 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship project in Cultural Mediations, Directions and Dead Ends in the “Law and Literature” Movement, takes up the stakes of that claim. First, by paying close attention to Law and Literature’s formation, goals, situation, theoretical investments, and ideological thrust, it will demonstrate that the radicalness and political praxis implicit in the rhetoric of a “movement” promised more than the field could deliver. Second, by drawing on recent debates within world literary studies and the critical tradition of cultural materialism, it will offer the field of Law and Literature, and by extension, the broader field of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, a way to live up to not only the claim, but also the responsibility, of being a movement. Undertaking research in the modes of critique and reconstruction, the project’s central objective is to shift fundamentally the grounds of the field, arguing for the reconstruction of Law and Literature along more globally inclusive and materialist lines.”
