Submitted Abstract
My project research falls into the “law and literature” movement. The movement declines into two major categories: Law-as-literature : where the literature methodology is applied to the legal discourse (see James Boyd White) — Law-in-literature: where literature takes justice, injustice, and turns them into fictional discourse (see François Ost).My contribution proposes a new approach that doesn’t fall into the categories above: law with literature. I will use the paradigm of the “dance” that keeps both disciplines linked together but at a fair distance at the same time. Law and literature can’t develop their thesis hermetically anymore, but must rather move and enrich each other. Such a synthesis and a paradigm don’t exist to date.To get there, I will isolate respective components of the law and literature disciplines (legislator/author-norm/text-receiver/reader). I intend to show that the text requires a pre-existing freedom of the reader (before reading) as well as a personal heuristic responsibility (after reading). Then I will proceed to an interdisciplinary analysis and dialogue between the components (legislator/author-norm/text-receiver/reader), and a dialectic gathering to get to my conclusive paradigm (the “dance”). My methodology will be based on (1) the literary artwork of major writers whose contribution to cultural thought were essential (Calvino, Pirandello, Le Clézio, Coetzee, Kertész…); (2) the textual hermeneutics of Eco, the 3 mimesis of Ricoeur, the theory of reception of Iser and Jauss, Habermas’ communicative theories, and the theory of the paradigm defined by Thomas Kuhn.The outcomes of the “dance” paradigm and the new “Law with literature” reading grid will intend to formalize the hypothesis that the action by men and the call of fiction are necessary phenomena to the legal experience: law is of citizen responsibility, in the sense that Sartre means responsibility as that of every free man acting as his own legislator.