Bloomsbury Academic

Bloomsbury Academic

English

In the German tradition, law sometimes looks to literature to convey its decisions, and vice versa. Goethe, Hoffmann, the Grimms, Kleist, Kafka, and others were trained as legal scholars. Beebee (Penn State) explores interactions going beyond "mirror of justice" modality--a topos of literary texts from marriage, economics, and so on--to explain the interaction between law and literature in the German language. In the case of Herder, Hegel, Fichte, and the Grimms, historical and literary examples reveal how laws and legal systems conform to the standards of the people they regulate. By contrast, Goethe treads the legal paths with literary finesse, accommodating, for example, Kant's philosophy of marriage. Kafka, entangled by bureaucratic coded law, forces truth while withholding it in the juridical sense. In the Weimar period, critics like Rudolf Borchardt and Ernst Robert Curtius struggled to differentiate literature from party-political activity. Beebee considers the double and triple meanings of certain German words: Schuld (guilt/debts), Prozess (trial/process), Gewalt (power/ violence), Zensur (censorship/academic grades). Peter Weiss draws paradox out of Werte (values/valuables) in Investigation, a play about the Holocaust, creating a script for trials for which there is no official transcript and thus coupling literature with the legal world. Fine bibliography and index. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --L. J. Rippley, St. Olaf College