The form of a text is not only crucial when it comes to the development of literary studies as a discipline, but also concerning the degree of a text’s literariness. However, after the poststructuralist turn, questions of form seem to have lost their significance in the wake of cultural and gender studies, as well as discourse analysis and systems theory, while history and sociology, sometimes even natural sciences, return to such questions. The latter have begun to use methodologies from literary studies, such as narratology, rhetoric or semiotics, in their consideration of form as modelling reality. The CRC posits a narrow definition of 'literature' in order to be able to regard the particularities of the literary and of methods in literary studies in an interdisciplinary context. The concept of 'form' per se, however, is naturally very complex, but the use of the term does not only seem suitable on the grounds of its tradition, but also from a systematic perspective inasmuch as the term 'form' implies structure, genre, medium and aesthetics. The CRC thus approaches the concept of form amid law and literature on a variety of different analytical levels. The form of both legal and literary texts and their generic particularities as well as their strategies of appropriating various subjects from both disciplines are crucial. At the same time, a specific focus lies on their respective self-reflection and meta-awareness, which imply an understanding of their forms themselves and are therefore subject to comparisons. Furthermore, the CRC seeks to show that the law sometimes strategically appropriates literary aesthetics for its own purposes. The forum and the associated projects within the CRC thus place the emphasis on how law and literature effect each other materially, comparatively and also constitutively in their respective forms. This approach includes a number of research objectives: what formal elements are typical or specific for either discipline? How do these formal elements relate to aspects of genre or cultural or historical context as well as to different forms of understanding both the terms ‘law’ and ‘literature’? How do law and justice interact rhetorically in different legal contexts? What are considered legitimate or illegitimate means? Is there a comparable moral framing in place? How does a legal text’s rhetoric relate to legal norms? What is the law’s view of rhetoric more generally?
The forum therefore places a specific emphasis on analyses of form and the relevance of concepts for form for the composition of legal and literary texts. It aims at a fruitful exchange concerning questions of methodology within analytical approaches. The course of this transfer of knowledge thus runs more along the trajectory from literary studies towards the law than the other way around.