SUMÁRIO


 
 
ANAMORPHOSIS – Revista Internacional de Direito e Literatura 
v. 5, n. 1, janeiro-junho 2019 
© 2019 by RDL – doi: 10.21119/anamps.51.317-328 

 

 
317 

 
 

INTERVIEW WITH GRETA OLSON 

FEEL EMPOWERED TO TELL YOUR 

OWN LEGAL-CULTURAL STORY 

BY DIETER AXT 1 

 

 

Greta Olson is a Professor of English and American Literary and 

Cultural Studies at the University of Giessen and was a Fellow Researcher 

at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law 

as Culture” in Bonn (2014, 2016). She is the editor-in-chief of the European 

Journal of English Studies (EJES), Alongside Jeanne Gaakeer (Erasmus 

School of Law / HOL), she is the co-founder of the European Network for 

Law and Literature (www.eurnll.org), whose core proposals are to 

encourage the studies on Law and Literature and to promote European 

collaboration around the theme. 

Currently, her research areas of interest focus on Law, Narrative 

Politics, Feminism, Queer and Gender, the critical study of North American 

politics and culture, and the Media. Throughout her academic trajectory, 

she has received several awards related to her research. 
 

 

 

                                                             
 
1  Master in Public Law by Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS). Bachelor of 

Law by Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). Screenwriter of the TV 
show Law & Literature (TV Justiça - Brazil). Member of the Brazilian Law and Literature 
Network (RDL). Editorial Assistant of Anamorphosis - International Journal of Law and 
Literature. Writer and editor of Le Chien Publishing House. Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. CV 
Lattes: http://lattes.cnpq.br/1582390811392545. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-
0976-7326. E-mail: dieter@rdl.org.br. 

http://www.eurnll.org/
http://lattes.cnpq.br/1582390811392545
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0976-7326
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0976-7326
mailto:dieter@rdl.org.br


 
 
 
 

ANAMORPHOSIS – Revista Internacional de Direito e Literatura, v. 5, n. 1, p. 317-328 

 
 

 
318 

 
 

Dieter Axt – In the opening issue of the interview section for 

Anamorphosis we interviewed Jeanne Gaakeer who, together with you, 

founded the European Network of Law and Literature (EURNLL). More 

recently, we have also had the opportunity to interview Daniela Carpi, 

founder of Associazone Italiana Diritto e Letteratura (AIDEL). How do 

EURNLL and AIDEL foster the exchange of ideas among their researchers 

and associates? Which initiatives would you highlight? 

Daniela Carpi and AIDEL are wonderful resources in terms of getting 

the word out about new Law and Literature publications and events. Under 

Daniela’s leadership, the AIDEL network publishes a journal, holds a 

yearly conference, and in its newsletter publicizes the work of those 

working in Europe along with what are often the better known publications 

of US American and British colleagues.  

From the beginning, Jeanne Gaakeer and I (EURNLL) have had a 

slightly different emphasis. We highlight research based in Europe and 

spread the word about European conferences, researchers, and resources. 

This occurs through our dialogic publications, and through our both 

featuring the work of those who are outside of the North American 

paradigms in conferences and other scholarly and public events. Jeanne 

has just published her book Judging from Experience: Law, Praxis, 

Humanities (2019) and my From Law and Literature to Legality and 

Affect is scheduled to come out in 2020. In both of these monographs as 

well as in other essay publications, we individually argue for the need for 

differentiated narratologies of law and point out that narratives of law 

cannot be based solely on the Anglo-American common law based model. 

Individually, we host events in Germany and the Netherlands that feature 

Continental European and other non-Anglo-American narratives and 

cultures of law. I am about to hold a workshop on Rechtsgefühle (feelings 

about law/justice) that centers on European work on affect and law, and 

Jeanne shall provide a keynote there.  

This is not in any sense to be critical of our wonderful North 

American colleagues and friends. Rather, it is to push back at a history that 

suggests that Law and Literature was a US American invention that began 

only during the 1970s. Many European and other interventions into the 

intersections of the poetic/literary and the legal took place outside the 



 
 
 
 

OLSON; AXT  |  Fell empowered to tell your own... 

 
 

 
319 

 
 

United States well before the 1970s. This is to look at the specifics of 

particular Law and Literature histories, for instance, in the Netherlands 

and in France and in Austria and Germany, or in the Igbo Nation. The 

issue here is that these efforts were not called Law and Literature per se 

but bore other names. 

 

Dieter Axt – You obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Vassar College (NY) in 

1986, where you studied Philosophy and Studio Arts, and you studied Art 

History and Philosophy at University College London. Later, you focused 

your studies on English Literature until you approached Law and 

Literature. Tell us a little about your academic and professional 

trajectory: how was this path from Art and Literature to Law? What is 

your assessment on the development of the studies of Law and Literature 

in the European Continent? 

Actually, after studying visual arts and philosophy in the States and 

in Britain, I went on to study comparative linguistics and philosophy as 

well as English and American studies after coming to Germany, as well as 

of course learning German. While I am a German civil servant and have 

three German children and have also lived for the greater part of my life in 

Germany, my nationality remains US American. I therefore describe 

myself as a hyphenated German. Like many people who work 

interdisciplinarily, I am a border crosser. This means that I do not have a 

deep sense of certitude about the inevitability and rightness of any one set 

of disciplinary and methodological tools and approaches as compared to 

others. The same goes for my disciplinary moorings. I take training that I 

did in philosophy and studio art and linguistics as well as in literary and 

cultural studies to my analyses of law and legal processes to treat them as 

cultural phenomena. 

As I document in my essay from 2015 on the “Futures of Law and 

Literature” and in my forthcoming book From Law and Literature to 

Legality and Affect, there has been an expansion of the type of aesthetic 

text that is the object of analysis in Law and Literature. Whereas a once 

somewhat narrow canon of Shakespeare’s tragedies and Victorian novels 

constituted the bulk of the objects of research on the literature side of Law 



 
 
 
 

ANAMORPHOSIS – Revista Internacional de Direito e Literatura, v. 5, n. 1, p. 317-328 

 
 

 
320 

 
 

and Literature, with regretfully little work being taken into account from 

other languages or cultures, the field has now expanded enormously. Law 

and Literature now encompasses Law and Film, Law and Television, Law 

and Art, Law and the Material, Law and the Aesthetic, and Law and Sound. 

Many shall disagree with me in this albeit very broad assessment of what is 

the literary in Law and Literature. For instance, does the literary have to be 

primarily constituted by the written or the spoken word? Be this as it may, 

the leading periodicals in Law and Literature now include work focusing 

on science fiction, television, youth literature, romance, and porn. The 

genres and art forms that can now be spoken about in Law and Literature 

include sculpture and painting, as well as literary fiction.  

In terms of what has gone on in European Research, there is a new 

awareness of the need to articulate specifically European and other local 

histories of Law and Literature. I published another comparative essay in 

2015 that discussed Law and Literature in Brazil. This was an albeit very 

imperfect piece because I do not speak or read Portuguese and was 

therefore reliant on translations into German and English and some kind 

‘native informants.’ There, I wrote something quite similar – that Law and 

Literature has to be thought of as more than one history or field of 

research. Individual Law and Literatures depend on the specific legal, 

cultural, and political circumstances and histories of the places where they 

are produced and to which they speak and respond. This includes the 

various ways in which aesthetic interventions into the legal are expressed. 

They articulate critique of either legal practice in itself or what is viewed as 

an inequitable legal environment more generally. This can be not only 

through literature, in the traditional sense, but also through graffiti and 

music. 

I see many, many people working on specific histories in Europe. 

These include to name only a few colleagues Gisèle Sapiro, Frans-Willem 

Korsten, Ralph Grüttemeier, Claudia Lieb, Ted Laros, Sylvia Sasse, 

amongst many, many others. The Nordic nations have entered into a 

dialogue with one another about their not always untroubled Law and 

Literature histories as well, due to colonization. This explicitly European 

Law and Literature work accompanies new and pressing issues such as the 



 
 
 
 

OLSON; AXT  |  Fell empowered to tell your own... 

 
 

 
321 

 
 

possible dissolution of Europe due to ethnonationalism. The question 

arises of whether there is a need for a common European narrative or 

narratives that might also be garnered through Law and Literature work. 

Would such narrative be helpful in creating a more cohesive sense of 

European identity? 
 

Dieter Axt – How do narrative and metaphor merge with the juridical 

speech?  

If I may answer the question somewhat indirectly, I find that there 

has been a narrative turn in critical legal studies, with many legal 

researchers now embracing the idea that law is narratively constructed 

and interpreted and that narratological concepts and models are helpful. 

Yet there is a quite palpable distrust of metaphor in much critical legal 

work, a suspicion of metaphor’s capacity to distort or to be used 

ideologically, and of metaphor and other tropes’ affective importance in 

terms of rhetoric. My argument has been that narrativization and 

metaphorization are both important to cognitive world and sense making. 

Both are intrinsic to creating and interpreting law, also in terms of how 

juridical discourse is constructed. Thus, I argue for conjoined 

narratological and metaphorological investigations of the legal. 
 

Dieter Axt – One of your major areas of research and interest concentrates 

on the topics of feminism, gender and sexual diversity. The western 

representation of Justice – and of Law itself – has always invoked 

feminine icons of the Greco-Latin world: the Greek goddess of Justice, 

Dike; Themis, Dike’s mother, representing the statute; Iustitia. In Oresteia, 

it is Pallas Athena who utters the renowned Minerva Vow. On the other 

hand, switching from symbology to reality, the juridical practice in Courts 

and Universities seems not to translate in importance this feminine 

symbolic representation of Law. What is your assessment of women’s 

participation in Law and their place in the juridical career? 

Your question is complex. I want to avoid any essentialization that 

says that the Feminine is this and the Masculine is that. Such 

differentiations rest on a binaric thinking pattern, which leads to 



 
 
 
 

ANAMORPHOSIS – Revista Internacional de Direito e Literatura, v. 5, n. 1, p. 317-328 

 
 

 
322 

 
 

needless stereotyping of so-called typical masculine and feminine 

behaviors. As deconstructive practice has shown us, this binary becomes 

unstable as soon as one starts to take the terms apart. There is a 

historical questioning of masculinist assumptions about the rationality 

and centrality of legal process in literature, for instance, in Antigone and 

in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and A Jury of Her Peers. Further, feminist 

legal critique has shown how much law (property, family, criminal, tax) 

has been based on the conditions of propertied, white, heterosexual cis 

men, and this has led to the elision of the representation of interests of 

everyone who is not a propertied, white heterosexual man. I have pointed 

out a problematic tendency to gender Law as masculine and brutish and 

Literature as feminine and ethical in some Law and Literature work. A 

huge discrepancy also remains, for instance, between the prevalence of 

women judges and particularly women judges of color in fictional 

television and film representations of law and the actual numbers. In 

other words, the prominent visibility of women legal actors in 

fictionalized accounts of law can often lead to very non-progressive 

politics. So, let’s be critical of the masculine-feminine binary in general. 

 

Dieter Axt – One of the main topics of juridical debate nowadays resides 

on the effectuation of policies to recognize minorities and socially 

stigmatized groups, seeking to promote a more equal and democratic 

society. This subject often conflicts defenders of judicial minimalism with 

those who support the possibility of a more activist position by the Courts. 

What is the extension of the operation of Courts in subjects such as the 

effectuation of the rights of minorities? Should gender be visible or 

invisible to the blind Justice, to quote a recent question proposed by 

Camille Paglia? Has Literature been successful in this debate? 

There is a fundamental dilemma here. When the courts protect 

minorities they also reify the status of the minority as being in need of 

protection and in some sense having less agency. Yet testimony and 

witness narratives are increasingly recognized in legal studies as a means 

of expression for those who have not previously been recognized in and by 

law. The steady expansion of catalogues of human rights to include 



 
 
 
 

OLSON; AXT  |  Fell empowered to tell your own... 

 
 

 
323 

 
 

communal rights, and the universalization of human rights discourse in all 

areas of law bespeak efforts to render law and politics more democratic. 

Yet, as with gender, it is simplistic to assert that legal representation 

automatically equals more progressive politics and more rights for 

minority groups. 

 

Dieter Axt – On the literary field, the writer and social critic Camille 

Paglia identifies that women were often “victims of the law, instead of its 

agents”. This, in fact, has been one of the main insurgences of the 

suffragist movement, when strongly developed in early 20th-century 

England. To what extent has the democratic political process been 

achieving success in reorganizing these traditional spaces of 

representation? Has such space been contemplated by Literature in its 

pages? 

One goal of liberal feminism and what I would call liberal queer 

advocacy is to achieve equal rights under the law for both genders and/or for 

sexual minorities. In many post-industrial societies, this goal has already 

been achieved. However, equal rights under the law does not equate with an 

equality of representation or of articulation. Nor does it end discrimination. 

This concerns not only law but also social attitudes and internalized forms of 

discrimination. Hence, legal studies need to be combined with an awareness 

of how social identities and attitudes and prejudices are created and 

maintained. 

 

Dieter Axt – Since Ancient Greece, western Literature has vastly 

represented female characters. By way of illustration, we can make 

reference to Antigone, Hester Prynne, Hedda Gabler, Emma Bovary, Anna 

Karenina, Capitu, Elizabeth Bennet. On the other hand, there have not 

been that many female writers to stand out in our literary universe. Can 

you identify a reason for that? What is your assessment of the 

representation of the feminine in western Literature? 

There is no simple answer to this question. First, historically women 

were simply not expected to or socialized to articulate themselves in the 

same manner or with the same force as men. This has affected notions of 



 
 
 
 

ANAMORPHOSIS – Revista Internacional de Direito e Literatura, v. 5, n. 1, p. 317-328 

 
 

 
324 

 
 

literary authority. Until quite recently, and now only sporadically, women 

authors, like people of color, and working-class people were vastly 

underrepresented in the literary canon. Second, valuations of ‘great’ 

literature have tended to praise a masculinist aesthetic as in Modernist 

poetry, which was gendered and classist and hence simply less available as 

a means of expression to most women authors. Third, there is a vast 

difference between the quite variable representations of women in 

literature and how women produce literature on an individual level. 

 

Dieter Axt – Democracy requires constant toleration of differences… 

Recently, however, the Hungarian government has banned gender studies 

in universities. In Germany, while the implementation of the “third 

gender” is discussed, conservative sectors claim the end of the “gender 

delusion” (Genderwahn) in language and Education. In Brazil, a bill 

named “Nonpartisan School” (Escola Sem Partido) is currently in the 

House of Representatives, directed against “political and ideological 

indoctrination” in schools, largely motivated by themes connected to 

gender and sexual diversity. On the other hand, Scotland was the first 

country to embed LGBTI teaching in the school curriculum. What does this 

global conjuncture allow us to apprehend? Within this scenario, what is 

the relevance of opening space for the discussion of themes such as 

feminism, gender and sexual diversity in classrooms for the task of 

forming citizens? And how could Literature resonate on this debate?  

I am interested in the clashes of values and norms that are going on 

in sexual cultures now and how these conflicts are also reflected on in law. 

You are correct that the Alternative for Germany party campaigns against 

“Gender-hysteria,” “gender-terror” and “gender-insanity” as well as against 

the supposed “early sexualization” of students in schools. Hungary has 

banned gender studies, Brazil may do so as well, and one result of the 

#MeToo discussion and debate has been legislative efforts to regulate 

sexuality more and to make explicit consent prerequisite to sexual 

activities. On the other hand, queer marriage has just been legalized in 

Taiwan and recently in Germany, the United States, and Ireland. This 

process has occurred far more rapidly than was thought possible only 



 
 
 
 

OLSON; AXT  |  Fell empowered to tell your own... 

 
 

 
325 

 
 

twenty years ago. The proliferation of Christopher Street Day festivals 

throughout European cities speaks for a new openness and celebration and 

making visible of formally non-normative sexual lifestyles. I see these 

trends as clashing with one another. One trajectory is to close down the 

recent proliferation of genders and sexual orientations and also to regulate 

sex more. The other is to do just the opposite. I believe we need the arts 

and literary and cultural critique to comprehend these contradictory 

tendencies. Literature and aesthetic vehicles can imagine gendered and 

sexual worlds before they occur in reality. The arts also deal with current, 

highly evident anxieties about how people are or are not having sex and 

living out their gendered identities. 

 

Dieter Axt – You deal with the “pornification” of mainstream culture in 

post-industrial western societies, clearly identifying this phenomenon in 

the relationship that young people have been developing with the 

exposition of their image in social media. This scenario would indicate 

that we have gotten used to the regularity of porn in our realities. What is 

the place of obscenity in this society of hyper exposition? Does this new 

mainstream culture rupture or reproduce sexist patterns?   

There is a huge debate going on right now about whether the so-

called pornification of culture is leading to a number of behavioral crises, 

such as men becoming so addicted to porn that they are no longer able to 

have sex in actual relationships, such as girls and boys learning about 

sexual initiation through porn representations of extreme sexual acts, or 

as young women measuring their bodies and perceived attractiveness 

against a porn actress ideal. The other side says that the ubiquity of 

digital porn and the variety of it has helped sexual minorities to find their 

communities and fulfil their desires. Pro-porn individuals also argue that 

more differentiated porn now also caters to women’s sexual tastes. It is 

estimated that women represent roughly a third or more of porn users. 

Pornification, according to these arguments, has led to a democratization 

of sex, which is no longer controlled by the experts. See the work of 

Foucault. Law interacts with this to the degree it censors porn, controls 

what is available, and can be used to limit access. 



 
 
 
 

ANAMORPHOSIS – Revista Internacional de Direito e Literatura, v. 5, n. 1, p. 317-328 

 
 

 
326 

 
 

 

Your question seems to me to take “obscenity” as a given. This word 

contains a normative judgement about what should be permitted to be 

seen, with which I cannot easily agree. Mainstream culture always 

contains contradictory elements – dominant, emergent, and residual 

patterns. So, I would say that contemporary cultures include some 

narratives and images that disrupt traditional sexist patterns and some 

that reify these patterns. 

 

Dieter Axt – In 2014, Deborah de Robertis featured in an art intervention 

in front of Gustave Courbet’s “Origin of the World”, at Musée d’Orsay, in 

Paris, exposing her genitalia, enacting the French artist’s painting. The 

performance was praised by the visitors at the museum, but cost her a 

complaint for sexual exhibitionism. What is the limit of the Law in Art? 

And what if Deborah de Robertis’ enactment had been reproduced by a 

passer-by on public road? 

The classic differentiation is that when explicit material is recognized 

as belonging to the realm of art it becomes free from many forms of legal 

control. Then, it is authors and literary experts, or artists and art historians 

who have the last word about what is possible and permissible and 

desirable in art. What has been considered to be “obscenity” is then valued 

as art. Then it may also become mundane. In other words, the arts develop 

their own means, canons, and rules and forms of self-control. And, this 

process is historically and culturally highly variable. 

 

Dieter Axt – Does Law tame and dominate the bodies?  

Law can be used to tame and control bodies. Black bodies have 

historically been treated as property in US American law, rather than as 

parts of fully recognized legal persons. Women’s bodies, sexuality, and 

reproduction continue to be subject to gendered forms of legal control. See 

the new anti-abortion legislation in Alabama, which if successful, shall not 

end abortion, but shall make it difficult for other than materially better off  

 



 
 
 
 

OLSON; AXT  |  Fell empowered to tell your own... 

 
 

 
327 

 
 

women to attain in safe forms. Law interacts with other forms of social 

regulation in controlling bodies. 

 

Dieter Axt – How does technology impact memory and writing? In what 

ways has Literature been affected by the electronic information society? 

Digitality has definitely changed how we express ourselves and in 

what forms. People who write professionally, whether authors or 

journalists or jurists – now do so in many forms, also digitally in order to 

make themselves heard. Arguably, the so-called iconic turn has given a 

new weight to the visual as the primary mode of expression. As 

everything from case archives to photos of our children is stored digitally 

and is only partially accessible in haptic modes, there is also an argument 

that memory has been altered, that it has become disembodied, and that 

part of our memory function has been outsourced to our hard drives or 

the cloud. 

There is a difference when I read a book or about a legal case while 

holding a book or a print-out text in my hands or look at a printed out 

photograph of my granddaughter rather than on my mobile phone. 

Literature has responded to the digital turn by incorporating new forms 

of expression – blogging, Instagram, Tweets, memes – into newer 

aesthetic modes, often in mash-up form. The affects and social mores of 

reading are also changing as we read and interact with literature and 

other media on screen. 

 

Dieter Axt – Finally, what future perspectives could you project for the Law 

and Literature movement in the European continent? What particular 

works of Literature would you recommend for jurists? 

I would continue to encourage European Law and Literature 

practitioners to concentrate on contextualizing and historicizing whatever 

literature is important in their specific local environment. This includes 

taking popular culture seriously. Look at whatever legal television series 

people are talking about. Take the pleasure people take in that series or 

other aesthetic forms seriously. Think about the form of the text and how 



 
 
 
 

ANAMORPHOSIS – Revista Internacional de Direito e Literatura, v. 5, n. 1, p. 317-328 

 
 

 
328 

 
 

the form conveys messages about law and legal processes. See if local legal 

preoccupations are addressed. Also think about the politics of the literature 

or series or music or visual art work you are looking at and how this 

interacts with the legal environment. Feel empowered to tell your own 

legal-cultural story. 

 

 

Translated by Felipe Zobaran