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LAW AND LITERATURE STUDIES. STORIES OF DECLINE AND RENEWALThe article discusses recent Scandinavian research contributions in the light of an on-going debate about interdisciplinary studies on law and literature. What does, or should, the 'and' in 'law and literature studies' entail? This question not only concerns the field's two objects, law and literature, but also the interdisciplinarity between juridical science and literary studies that it presupposes: what are the points of contact between law and literature; in what ways do they oppose each other, and how can the intersections between them be productively explored? The law and literature movement has become an international, broad field of study since its formation in the USA in the 1970s. This article is concerned primarily with its development in a contemporary Norwegian and Nordic context. The first part of the article explores the somewhat tabloid story of the field's decline that unfolded in Norwegian media during 2016. The second discusses recent research contributions, in order to suggest productive ways in which to develop law and literature studies, by telling a story of renewal rather than one of decline.Keywords humanities, interdisciplinary studies, law and literature Debatten begynte i Nytt norsk tidsskrift i mai 2016. I artikkelen «Justismord, lov og rett. En fortelling om mislykket tverrfaglighet» kom rettsfilosof Eivind Kolflaath med skarp kritikk av den såkalte bergensskolens forskning på lov, rett og litteratur.1 Artikkelen tok utgangs-1. Betegnelsen «The Bergen School» ble tatt i bruk ironisk av gruppen selv på 1990-tallet, men har siden befestet seg og tilsynelatende mistet sitt ironiske tilsnitt også når det brukes av de involverte forskerne (jf. Haarberg 2010).

Jan Kjaerstads roman Berge. En åpning av den offentlige samtalen om terrorangrepene 22. juli 2011? Jan Kjaerstad's novel Berge. An "opening up" of the public debate on the terror attacks of

Olaug Nilssen’s Tung tids tale (2017) is a novel about speaking to and for the disabled and disarticulate child in the role as mother and caregiver. Olaug, the narrator, tells the story of her son Daniel’s regressive autism and of the challenges she meets as she tries to mediate between him and the outside world, in particular health personnel and other professional caregivers. The narration is directed towards Daniel himself, addressed as ”you”. Because Daniel is unable to use verbal language and reply, the address resembles the figure of the apostrophe. The communication circuit it generates is triangulated, involving both the ”I” that sends the message, the unresponsive ”you” who is unable to respond to it, and a third party intended to overhear it – in this case the implicit or historical readers of the text. In the article the functions of this address is explored in the light of how the novel thematizes caregiving as an act of witnessing. I argue that the apostrophic address produces an alternative to the novel’s narrative through the establishment of an aesthetic and rhetorical event constituted by the communicative situation itself. The address thus provides a formal way of handling the ethical and existential dimensions connected to Olaug’s role as caregiver and narrator in a text that speaks both for and to her son.

Medicalized literary criticism was a widespread phenomenon across Europe in the decades surrounding the year 1900. The term describes varied practices of literary criticism founded on medical terminology and imagery. Critics with different professional backgrounds participated in this type of criticism, often by connecting medical analogies to established notions of fin de siècle decline and decadence. This article explores the proliferation and various uses of medicalized literary criticism in Norway in this period, including a case study of the literary criticism and discussion performed by two Norwegian psychiatrists and asylum doctors, Johan Scharffenberg and Henrik A. Th. Dedichen. I argue that these ‘medics-as-critics’ responded and contributed to the medicalized literary criticism and, by extension, to the establishment and prevalence of certain illness narratives in the public sphere.