Bleumer, Hartmut: Vom guten Recht des Teufels
Zitation
Bleumer, Hartmut: Vom guten Recht des Teufels. Kasus, Tropus und die Macht der Sprache beim Stricker und im Erzählmotiv "The Devil and the Lawyer" (AT 1186; Mot M 215). In: Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 41 (2011), S. 149-174
Beschreibung
The devil is a famous figure in the medieval discourse on justice and is notoriously reliable in legal actions. Thus he occurs in a story-type which presents the devil as seizing lawyers or judges. In several examples dating from the early the 13th century onward, this story-type seems to discuss the difficult relationship between legal rationality and narrative values. From these stories emerges a small but complete model of law and literature. Their structures reveal a common primary concern: whether judgement on a case solely derived according to the logic of legal rules can also be just (billig) without the influence of narrative patterns. If so, legal thinking would lack a higher tropological sense of what is true. At the very least, the story-type demonstrates what performativity in justice means: to pass a judgment on someone is shown as a speech act similar to praying or cursing. This implies not only that the narration can also become a kind of verdict, but also that the story-type itself has to be judged in a space between law and literature.
(Abstract)