Biolographes. Literary creativity and biological knowledge in the 19th century

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Klinkert
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 246483357

The term biology, coined in Germany and France at the beginning of the 19th century (by Treviranus and Lamarck), marks the emergence of a new field of research, which instantly sparked the enthusiasm of experts of other disciplines and of writers. French literature seizes on biological knowledge early on, utilizing its concepts in ways more or less true to their original meaning, commenting and elaborating on them and finding new topics and forms, thereby contributing to their promotion as a global cultural reality, through discourses, which have, in turn, impacted the reception and even the thinking of scientists themselves. It is this flow of knowledge that we wish to address in this project, focusing on knowledge from the field of biology, as much because the invention of the term signals the emergence of a new disciplinary awareness (breaking with the older natural history), as because we thereby touch upon the transformations of a fundamental knowledge, closely linked to the conceptualization of the living, where existing research has preferred to focus on other disciplines (physics, mathematics, medicine, geology) or the sudden advent of technology. Biolographes, therefore, intends to fill a significant gap, in providing a benchmark study on the impact of biological knowledge on French literary production in the 19th century, developed from the standpoint of a literary criticism open to interdisciplinary research and addressed to other specialists of literary theory as well as to cultural and scientific historians. To this end, we plan to provide an original and representative corpus of literary works dealing with biological knowledge, taking into account major authors as well as lesser-known ones, published texts, private and draft documents. These documents will be the object of literary analysis and mass studies with the threefold objective of:- understanding the channels and modalities of the spread of this knowledge among writers- analyzing the usage and function of biological knowledge in literary works, under thematic (what topics do they treat, with which epistemological inflexions?), pragmatic (to what effect?) and formal aspects (what are the processes of transformation, the narrative and poetic yield, the structuring effects of this knowledge?); this also presupposes the identification of the ideological and rhetorical stakes of this knowledge (recourse to biological knowledge often serves broader debates of a philosophical, racial, political or esthetic nature)- modeling the temporal and conceptual concurrences and discrepancies between history of science and literature.The decision to present this project as a French-German program is justified by the nature of our research topic. For, without prejudging other, often better-researched foreign influences (e.g. that of Darwin), this study could not be conducted without taking into account the considerable impact of German scientists (especially Haeckel) on French writers.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France, Switzerland
• Participating Person: Professorin Dr. Gisèle Séginger