Law and Literature: Codes as Colonizing Texts and Legal Ideas in Anthropocene Works

Summary

THE STUDY OF LAW AND LITERATURE has a rich history in Germanistik and promises a bright future. As Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler note in their introduction to New Directions in Law and Literature (2017), myriad new interdisciplinary methodologies and inquiries have proliferated over the past decade. For my contribution to this Forum, I do not wish to recite the long list of Dichterjuristen (lawyer-poets) who inspired the first generation of scholars to investigate this intersection. Nor is my goal to review the recent work of our colleagues who have examined the interrelationships of law and humanistic inquiry more broadly. Rather, I seek to encourage continued innovation by highlighting a largely overlooked genre that may be especially fruitful for scholars of the Goethezeit (Age of Goethe) to explore and by adumbrating an emerging legal question into which we, as literary scholars, may have special insight.

“Law and Literature” has often been conceived of as having two branches: law in literature and law as literature. This distinction has, thankfully, been challenged to reveal the complex entanglement of laws and literatures in their various forms. After all, law also shapes literature, literature influences the law, and both share a number of imaginative and narrative capacities. To name just two terrific, recent studies, Chenxi Tang thoroughly examines how literature has shaped international law in Imagining World Order (2018) and Javier Samper Vendrell's fourth chapter in The Seduction of Youth (2020) considers the ways in which the Weimar Republic's Gesetz zur Bewahrung der Jugend vor Schund- und Schmutzschriften (Law for the Protection of Youth Against Trash and Smut) shaped queer periodicals. Yet the root division—“law in” and “law as”—helpfully draws attention to the tendency of most scholars to focus primarily on one object—the law or literature. Indeed, the ideas discussed below might each be thought to fall into just one of these traditional categories. But this distinction should compel us to interrogate the consequences of that focus and what else might be missing. As we continue to study the interrelationships of law and literature in the Age of Goethe, I hope we will increasingly attend to bigger questions about colonialism and the environment, in particular.