법문학이란 무엇인가? -법문학을 통한 법적 정의의 실현가능성에 대한 시론-

Abstract

Just as literature has always been taking parts in the formulation and development of law throughout the history, law has likewise had influence over literary works with means such as censorship. In spite of such intimacy, law and literature has not yet been treated as a major branch of legal studies. This article tries to demonstrate the external and internal correlation between literature and law, that literature and literary criticism could be greatly relevant not only to the understanding of politics of interpretation but also to the recovering of minor jurisprudence. As far as I'm concerned there may be both sides to the correlation: literature equilibrating law and law equilibrating literature. The former, on one hand, examines literary interpretation of court rhetorics and the application of literary susceptibilities to law. By doing so, law and literature could take performative action to reflect the usage of rhetorics in both law and the literary texts dealing with legal issues. It helps identifying different voices of the Other, so to speak, that were not properly heard in the existing discourse of human rights. On the other hand, the latter concentrates on how law intervenes in the formulation of literary works. The oldest and most common method would probably be censorship. The censoring of literature I'm talking about here, deals with more complex problem than just one-sided influence. When literature confronts censorship, it works out various literary alternatives to evade suppression, some of which improves quality of the work in the last place without intending so. The way literature responds to legal censorship would gradually bring change to law as well. Through these correlation suppressive structure of law would face aesthetical chance to reflect oneself and thereby reconstruct the way legal science talk and think about the problem of justice in this postmodern era we are facing now.