“Law and Literature”, which is considered as an interdisciplinary research, assumes that “law” and “literature” are two different and autonomous but complementary disciplines. There are three strands in law and literature movement – moral uplift, hermeneutic, and narrativethat law can possibly benefit from literature. These three strands suggest that literature has something that law does not have, therefore, what literature has but law does not have presumptuously defines what literature is and what law is not. However, this claim, such as literature represents real life, more humane than law, and literary theory that can help legal interpretation have been challenged.
Law is not lifeless as described that needs to be breathed into life. The reason why law needs help from other humanities is not because law is an empty non-human machine, but because law is in fact part of humanity as literature. If law is self-sufficient and has already owned what literature claims to have exclusively, and if what literature is supposed to be is a fantasy and literature is more similar to law than people think, the boundary between law and literature seems to be blurred. Or, the difference that defines law and literature as two disciplines may have never been existed. According to which, all the differences between law and literature, may not exist by nature, but are created to compare, and to ensure and assure the idea that they are different. If the idea of discipline is ambiguous, several questions, which are also what this paper is going to discuss, will arise: 1) Do we need to change the attitude to and the methodology of Law and Literature? 2) Will the reasons of comparison and the results we want to achieve be different? 3) Why law and “literature”? For answering these questions, the author will examine the idea of interdisciplinarity, point out the misconception of literature and the similarity between law and literature, and explain why “Law and Literature” is so special among all the “law-ands,” from the perspective of the nature of language, to propose an idea of transcendence-ality of “Law and Literature.”
2019.
International Workshop “Sinology – Chinese/China Studies – Guoxue: Their Interrelation, Methodologies, and Impact” Siegburg, Germany, 21–22 October 2019