Lawbreakers: Crime, Punishment, and Modernity

This seminar explores how modern writers use lawbreakers to explore collisions between the individual and the civic collective. Using major works of the Western literary canon, students will examine questions central to civic life: crime, punishment, law, legitimacy, moral responsibility, and the relationship between individual conscience and public order. Readings engage major literary and philosophic schools, including realism, absurdism, and existentialism, inviting reflection on justice, responsibility, and the fragile bonds of civic life.