Leiden University Student Repository

Bosch, Lotte van den (2021)

Speaking Law: The need for a narratological distinction between speaker functions in Law and Literature analysis

Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)

This thesis examines a possible contribution to the narratological analyses as carried out within the field of Law and Literature by both signalling narrative speaker functions in analyses by James Boyd White (1990) and Jeanne Gaakeer (1998) and locating these them in case law. The assumption that lies at the core of this thesis is that with the help of systematic analysis, it is possible to distinguish between four different speaker functions that manifest themselves in written case law: an authoritative author of legal decisions (chapter II), a narrator of the verdict (chapter III), characters that take part in the legal process and that are reflected upon in the judgment (chapter IV) and the text of the judgment itself (chapter V). These four possible speaking entities need to be disentangled to understand what authority or authorities we see when analysing judgments and to systematically conduct comparative research within the field of law and literature.

law and literature

narrative speaker functions

narratology

author

narrator

character

text

authority

comparative research

Author

Bosch, Lotte van den

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Supervisors

Horsman, Y.
Korsten, F.W.

ECTS Credits

25

Language

en