Literatur als Rechtslabor: Narrative und rechtliche Experimente im Anthropozän

Abstract

Taking the Anthropocene as a legal and ethical challenge as its starting point, this article explores how literature can become a laboratory for new legal ideas. It examines how narrative forms are able to expand, shift, or subvert legal and moral categories, thereby opening up spaces for experimental thought. Drawing on Dirk Roßmann’s Der neunte Arm des Oktopus (2020) and Olga Tokarczuk’s Der Gesang der Fledermäuse (2009), the analysis shows how twenty-first-century literature tests the limits of law: Roßmann on a global-political level and Tokarczuk on a mythical-ecological one. Both texts reveal that the future of law depends on the recognition of non-human actors and that literature will become a medium of this reassessment.