Law - Projects
Law
Positioning:
Law is based on a regulated and regulating interaction between individuals with different competencies and affiliations. It is necessarily tied to institutions, power relations, norms and reasoning, as it depends on individuals, media and forms of discourse and practices. Only due to these circumstances does it become what we think of as modern law: a system legally regulating coexistence and the practices of individuals in society. In this convergence of the necessary generality and normativity of law and the inevitably singular procedural of individual legal acts lies an aspect of law that interests us particularly in the projects pursued at the Centre. In addition to the connecting element (already discussed in detail in research) between literature and law in their capacity as text(ual studies), the projects at the Centre aim above all to take into account the (less narrow) concept of mediality.
Objective:
Developing interdisciplinary models; transdisciplinarily engaging with law and the sciences of art, literature and culture; science-theoretically reflecting; concluding the basic possibilities of inter- and transdisciplinarity;
Study materials:
Legal texts in different formats (decrees, verdicts and other judgement texts, legislative texts, comments, case reports), texts on legal theory, artistic texts in different formats.
The media of law/The law of media
Susanne Knaller, Doris Pichler
The project Medien des Rechts/Recht der Medien discusses both the media side of law and the legal side of media products. In addition to the legal sciences, different disciplines, primarily the studies of history, literature, culture and art as well as philosophy, are also taken into account. The project examines the different links that (could) arise between law and media and between legal and media discourses, and deal with related issues of interdisciplinarity as well as deal with the underlying questions of media.
- Lecture Series (WS 2015/16): Die Medien des Rechts. Das Recht der Medien. (for programme see poster/Plakat)
- Susanne Knaller/Doris Pichler (Hg.): Recht im medialen Feld. Aktuelle und historische Konstellationen, in: PhiN 12, 2017.
- Synposium Die Sprachen der Technokratie (19.01.2018)
„Law, economics and literature. A new interdisciplinary approach“
Habilitation project
Literary studies and their paradigms and models are always constituted in relation to other arts as well as to cultural, political, legal and economic systems. It is this interaction between asthetic and non-aesthetic systems and theories which makes literary studies appealing for other scientific disciplines as is proven by the appearance of a number of interdisciplinary research fields such as Law & Literature, Economics & Literature, Literature & Medicine, Literature & Science. The precondition of these interdisciplinary research fields is that the contributing disciplines all work with and on texts. The project aims to reflect on the potential and boundaries of interdisciplinarity especially within the above mentioned fields of Law and Literature and Economics and Literature, which connect aesthetic with non-aesthetic disciplines. Therefore we propose to widen the binary interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature into a triadic field of Law, Economics and Literature within which we aim to elaborate on an inter- and transdisciplinary concept of text (inspired by literary theory).
- Book project: Der literaturwissenschaftliche Textbegriff als interdisziplinärer Transferbegriff (Arbeitstitel)
- Conference „TextVerHandlungen: Literaturwissenschaft – praxeologisch; Textbegriffe – interdisziplinär“ (24.-25.01.2019)
- Recht im medialen Feld. Aktuelle und historische Konstellationen. PhiN Beiheft 12/2017 (ed. together with S. Knaller)
- Recht und Literatur im Zwischenraum. Law and Literature In-Between. Aktuelle inter- und transdiszplinäre Bezüge. Contemporary Inter- and Transdisciplinary Approaches. Bielefeld, transcript 2015 (ed. together with S. Knaller and C. Hiebaum)
- Gastvortrag: Richard Bronk (London School of Economics): „Uncertain futures and the role of imagination and narratives in economics“, 13.03.2019.
- Gastvortrag: Joseph Vogl (FU Berlin): „Fiskus und Finanz: Zum Begriff einer 'seignioralen Macht'“, 17.03.2015.
- Gastvortrag: Marett Leiboff (University of Wollongong): „Law and Literature: interpreting law and interpreting lawyers“, 12.05.2015.
The Voices of Justice: Argumentative Polyphony and Strategic Manoeuvring in Judgement Motivations. An Example from the Italian Constitutional Court
Doctoral project (submitted to Klostermann, "Analecta Romanica" series. Qualification and examination phase at the University of Bonn completed)
This study is devoted to the interplay between reasoning and polyphony in argumentative texts of the Italian Constitutional Court. Initially, it is observed that polyphony permeates judgment texts to such an extent that it is postulated as inherent in the judgment. Under this premise, it takes on a position similar to that of the argument itself, which in legal and law-linguistic literature is treated as an inseparable part of the judgments for which there is an obligation to state reasons. On the border between linguistic polyphony theory, argumentation theory and the analysis of legal discourse, this project hypothesises that polyphonic constructions have rhetorical-argumentative functions in the judgments and verdicts of the Italian Constitutional Court.
Marina Bletsas: “The Voices of Justice: Argumentative Polyphony and Strategic Manoeuvring in Judgement Motivations. An Example from the Italian Constitutional Court”. In: Frans H. van Eemeren/Bart Garssen (eds.), Scrutinizing argumentation in practice. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 2015, 77-98.
WOMAN in Legislative Discourse: Metaphorical Conceptualisations in Italian and French
Habilitation project
The metaphor as an indispensable cognitive instrument plays an important role, among other things, in the legislative process. The process is in turn representative and, at the same time, pioneering for everyday discourse of all cultures. Based on these premises, parliamentary discourse was chosen for examining the metaphorical (and metonymic) conceptualisation of the WOMAN.
Italian and French parliamentary discussions from the 19th and 20th centuries on women-related legislative proposals, such as the right to vote for women, serve as the corpus for this contrasting study. Against the background of a pragmatically enriched linguistic-cognitive approach, the question of linguistic expressions that suggest a metaphorical conceptualisation of WOMAN is first asked onomasiologically. In a second step, a semasiological perspective is attempted to model the abstract conceptual metaphors.
- Marina Bletsas: The Metaphorical Conceptualisation of WOMAN in Italian Legislative Discourse, Vortrag am RaAM-Specialised Seminar, Lüttich, May 2019.
Between Law and Literature, Fact and Fiction: Storytelling in ‘Outsiders of Society. Crimes of the Present’ (1924-25)
Doctoral project
This doctoral project focuses on an outstanding and yet still scarcely examined text corpus dating back to the Weimar Republic, in which well-known authors narrate contemporary crime cases in various, sometimes rather experimental forms. The research is centred on the interplay of law and literature in these texts: the cases included in the series explicitly and implicitly present a meeting of individuals and judiciary that has become problematic. The legal system and legal criticism are subjected to critical analysis on different levels in the texts: institutions, people, interpretation conventions, language use or standardisation processes are discussed controversially and also in a political context. The representation of emotions plays an important role for several reasons, while various strategies are used in the series to disclose the lack of treatment of emotions in court and to formulate a legal criticism.
- Mario Huber: „Physiognomik, Graphologie und Charakterologie als ‚Beweismittel‘. Handschriften in der Reihe ‚Außenseiter der Gesellschaft. Verbrechen der Gegenwart‘ (1924/25)“. In: Susanne Knaller/Doris Pichler (ed.): Die Medien des Rechts. Das Recht der Medien. Sonderheft Philologie im Netz (PhiN) 2017, 142-158.
- Mario Huber: „Das Material ordnen und ohne Ambitionen aufzeichnen. Hermann Ungars ‚Die Ermordung des Hauptmanns Hanika. Tragödie einer Ehe‘ (1925)“. In: Gabriel H. Decuble et al. (ed.): Literatur, Sprache und Kultur zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik. Berlin, Frank & Timme. [in preparation]