Based on the long-established American law and literature movement, the interdisciplinary research field of ‘law and literature’ is also beginning to hesitantly establish itself in Europe, whereby the Münster Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1385 Law and Literature has provided an important impetus for this development. The present work builds on the latter and aims to develop a contrastive interdisciplinary research method (‘legal counterfactual’) that claims to offer a methodological basis for the further development of the young research field of ‘law and literature’. The particular focus herein is on law in literature, neglecting ‘law as literature’ and the ‘law of literature’. Taking the American law and literature movement as a starting point, an overview of the heterogeneous research approaches in Italy, France, Belgium, and Germany is first provided. Thereafter, the focus shifts to a theoretical examination of the methodological concepts of interdisciplinarity and counterfactuality on the one hand, and the specific approaches to the text—namely discourse and hermeneutics—on the other. Based on these theoretical ‘building blocks’, the dividing lines between legal and literary studies are drawn in the first step, to identify the resulting intersections in the second step: the written text as a common working basis and the inseparable link with human society on the one hand, and hermeneutics and discourse as a means of analysing texts on the other. This realisation makes it possible to access literary texts from which the fictional legal discourse is methodically extracted and contrasted with the real-world text in a juxtaposing manner. The aim of this counterfactual contrast is to determine the degree of correspondence between diegetic and real law. Such an approach enhances the quality of the interdisciplinary understanding between literary and legal scholars and leads to an improved understanding of both, the literary text and the legal discourse it addresses. To consolidate this method of legal counterfactuals, five works of contemporary literature are tested and demonstrated in practice: La décision (2022) by Karine Tuil, Sworn Virgin (2014) by Elvira Dones, Unorthodox (2012) by Deborah Feldman, Repenti (2017) by Claude Chossat, and A Slap in the Face (2018) by Abbas Khider. The selection of these works is motivated by an interest in touching on different areas of law that have received little attention in interdisciplinary law and literature research to date, such as French anti-terror legislation, Albanian customary law of the Kanun, Talmudic law, Corsican feudal law of vendetta, and German asylum law. The analysis of these works, using the counterfactual method of investigation, reveals the numerous points of intersection between law and literature and opens positive perspectives for further interdisciplinary research approaches in the field of ‘law and literature’.

Introduction

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发表日期：

2025年

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Alexandra Juster

摘要

Based on the long-established American law and literature movement, the interdisciplinary research field of ‘law and literature’ is also beginning to hesitantly establish itself in Europe, whereby the Münster Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1385 Law and Literature has provided an important impetus for this development. The present work builds on the latter and aims to develop a contrastive interdisciplinary research method (‘legal counterfactual’) that claims to offer a methodological basis for the further development of the young research field of ‘law and literature’. The particular focus herein is on law in literature, neglecting ‘law as literature’ and the ‘law of literature’. Taking the American law and literature movement as a starting point, an overview of the heterogeneous research approaches in Italy, France, Belgium, and Germany is first provided. Thereafter, the focus shifts to a theoretical examination of the methodological concepts of interdisciplinarity and counterfactuality on the one hand, and the specific approaches to the text—namely discourse and hermeneutics—on the other. Based on these theoretical ‘building blocks’, the dividing lines between legal and literary studies are drawn in the first step, to identify the resulting intersections in the second step: the written text as a common working basis and the inseparable link with human society on the one hand, and hermeneutics and discourse as a means of analysing texts on the other. This realisation makes it possible to access literary texts from which the fictional legal discourse is methodically extracted and contrasted with the real-world text in a juxtaposing manner. The aim of this counterfactual contrast is to determine the degree of correspondence between diegetic and real law. Such an approach enhances the quality of the interdisciplinary understanding between literary and legal scholars and leads to an improved understanding of both, the literary text and the legal discourse it addresses. To consolidate this method of legal counterfactuals, five works of contemporary literature are tested and demonstrated in practice: La décision (2022) by Karine Tuil, Sworn Virgin (2014) by Elvira Dones, Unorthodox (2012) by Deborah Feldman, Repenti (2017) by Claude Chossat, and A Slap in the Face (2018) by Abbas Khider. The selection of these works is motivated by an interest in touching on different areas of law that have received little attention in interdisciplinary law and literature research to date, such as French anti-terror legislation, Albanian customary law of the Kanun, Talmudic law, Corsican feudal law of vendetta, and German asylum law. The analysis of these works, using the counterfactual method of investigation, reveals the numerous points of intersection between law and literature and opens positive perspectives for further interdisciplinary research approaches in the field of ‘law and literature’.