Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

George Martin’s novel series A Song of Ice and Fire uses fantastic literature elements to cover references to objective reality. To do so, it links the fictitious component, represented by The Others, to real elements outside the text, such as climate change. Based on this presumption, it is possible to see, in its pages, an allegory of the consequences of global warming. To prove that, this paper develops three axes, in which certain similarities are studied: the existence of a common threat, the narrative context of the novels, as well as the roles played by some of the characters.

This article is based on the novel The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell, and its main objective is to explore the experiences of its main character, Maximilien Aue, a Nazi officer, an SS member, a jurist, and a juris doctor, who on several occasions assumed the condition of executioner in one of the Einsatzgruppen that acted in the rear of the German front during the War against the Soviet Union. This study seeks to explore the relationship of this character with a political regime marked by authoritarianism and the erosion of the legal forms that characterize a Rechtsstaat – metaphorized in the figure of the Behemoth, in the interpretation given by Franz Neumann. The methodological structure is guided by strategies of approximation between law and literature, in order to allow, from the construction of a common hermeneutic situation, different ways of relating to the truth established in these two fields of knowledge to access new interpretations in order to analyze the intricate relationship between law and authoritarianism. The outcome, starting from Max Aue’s tragic experience, illuminated the fate reserved for those who, as people or individuals, had awakened the Erinyes from their benevolent sleep.

Faced with the constant reforms of constitutional texts in Ecuador and other nearby countries in Latin America, it is convenient to address their making from the perspective of transculturality. The present paper analyzes the recurrent processes of rewriting and refounding the legislation of Ecuador as moments of necessary social redefinition of its identity and, especially,  it studies the narrative in the preambles written for Ecuadorian Constitutions in order to appreciate the existence of transcultural concepts as spaces of encounter and cultural relations that make it possible to negotiate differences within the framework of a constant process of hybridization.

Friends of literature often claim that it is capable of making readers more tolerant and benevolent. Enemies of literature, on the other hand, claim that it is capable of corrupting readers. Both groups exaggerate the power of literature. The exaggeration has important consequences for the debate about the role of literature in the curriculum of law schools and also for the debate about the limits of literary expression. This paper discusses one literary work frequently used to exemplify the negative effects of literature: Goethe’s The sorrows of young Werther. It is a commonplace among literary scholars that the publication of the book caused numerous suicides in eighteenth-century Europe. This paper raises doubts about that commonplace by emphasizing the lack of evidence to support it as well as the gravity of its political implications.

This paper defends the idea that the intertextuality of materials in Die Hamletmaschine can be read based on different machines (or machinations) present in Hamlet that are disassembled in the post-dramatic play by Heiner Müller. Thus, history and theater themselves, that is, the ultimate meaning of an engaged playwright, go through this disassembly process, which, in the end, is the disassembly of the prince from Shakespeare’s play himself. As a playwright, in turn, the prince is a programmer, a legislator, a constitution writer, a writer who is tensioned by contemporary politics.

Recently, we have witnessed the projection of the methodology and epistemological categories of the Law & Literature movement for the other arts and humanities. This work offers an approximation of the relationship between law and music in two movements: first, by analyzing the categorial taxonomy inherited from literary approaches to law (law of music, law in music and law with music); and second, a synchronic approach to address two aspects of the interpretation that the discourse of modernity places at the center of the question: the authenticity of the interpretation and the normativity of the texts that are the object of it.

This paper reproduces the “introduction” of the book Judging from Experience: Law, Praxis, Humanities. The aim is to publicize to academic readers the content and the main ideas of this instigating work.

GONZÁLEZ, José Calvo. Criminologia Visual: selos postais como artefatos imagéticos de aculturação ideológico-jurídica. Tradução de Tamara Flores e Augusto Jobim do Amaral. Florianópolis: Tirant lo Blanch, 2019. (Série Ciências Criminais) 176p.