Lawyers and Literature

"It will be obvious by now that I am still in love with the word, still faithfully wed to text, and especially literary text. Reading such text remains, for me, the most interactive thing that we as humans do, converting these little black squiggles on white backgrounds into vast landscapes, ancient battlegrounds, and distant galaxies, into events more vivid than those on the news or on the streets outside with characters we know better than we know our own families and friends. That’s what writers invented: this enlargement of our imaginative powers." –Robert Coover, Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age [orginally published, Feed, 2000][on-line text]

     

"Every now and then one comes across some really powerful character in an out of the way place. I mean a really powerful character who writes, or paints, or walks up and down and things, like some overwhelming animal in a corner of the zoo. Perhaps, I feel terribly in need of encountering some such character." [Wallace Stevens, letter to Henry Church, dated November 20, 1945, in Holly Stevens (ed.), Letters of Wallace Stevens 517-518 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)(1966)][Wallace Stevens was a lawyer and a poet]

Assignments Assignments Archives

   Syllabus Course Evaluation

  A First Day Lecture

Questions About the Course More Questions about the Course

Reading Strategies Reflective Reading Exercises

Read to Write Talking About Course Writing

 Studying Literature Interpretation and Its Theories  

 Teacher Work Story & Narrative
Supplementary Readings

Exam Archive

 

  Web Site Created for Students at the College of Law, West Virginia University
by
Professor James R. Elkins

[First Posted: August, 1998; Page Redesign: September, 1999.
New Server & Updated Pages: December 7, 2003.
Substantial revisions, Spring, 2006 & Fall, 2007]

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