PROGRAM IN AMERICAN STUDIES

Imagining the end of the world is an ancient human enterprise, at once political, psychological, and religious. But in the last decade it has become a strategic imperative. Amid converging political and climate crises, humans everywhere are compelled to reconsider how they will live in an apocalypse that is already now. The course begins with Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement and ends with Camus’ The Plague. In between, we will consider the things humans are doing—and the stories they are telling, to themselves and each other—in the U.S. today and around the world. Readings to include Lisa Wells, Believers: Making A Life at the End of the World; Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone; Kate Brown, A Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future; selections from Estes and Dhillon, eds., Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NODAPL Movement; Barbara F. Walters, How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them;

For the past thirty years, reality television – a genre of programming that aims to give us a view into the “unscripted” actions of our peers – has been a dominant force in U.S. entertainment.  Many of us watch these shows to relax, to turn off our critical thinking, and to immerse ourselves wholly into some manufactured drama and schadenfreude.  Considered as a cultural text, though, reality television can illuminate some profound truths: about how we decide what is right and wrong, about the tension between written and unwritten rules, and whether anyone can simply be “here to make friends.” 

In this course, we ask what reality TV can teach us about the nature of law.  We’ll read and discuss key works in the philosophy of law from H.L.A. Hart, Lon Fuller, Ronald Dworkin, Scott Shapiro, and others, and then see how their ideas stand up to the test of shows like Survivor, The Bachelor, FBoy Island, Ink Master, and Bachelor in Paradise.  By the end of the quarter, students will be able to explain the main currents of thought in legal philosophy with reference to elimination ceremonies, confessionals, alliances, and other fundamentals of reality TV gameplay.