Epistemological Modernism: the empirical turn in natural science and culture around 1830

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Martina King
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392024438

The project investigates the fundamental changes in the system of cultural knowledge between 1820 and 1850. In this way, this underestimated epoch can be viewed in an entirely new light: it presents an epistemological modernism with a formative influence on modernization in the narrow sense around 1900. The starting point of the project is a new openness towards reality in the whole intellectual sphere around 1830 which was still unthinkable decades earlier. This empirical turn can be grasped with with the conceptual pair Erfahrungsdruck and Empirisierungszwang (Lepenies). The project will show that this new wealth of experience is linked to the development of modern life sciences, especially comparative anatomy and actualistic geology. However, it leaves its traces far beyond that realm in scientific and literary texts. The research hypothesis is that we find a reciprocal biologisation of literature and literarisation of the life sciences.This will firstly be investigated in a paradigmatic genre that science and literature share: travel prose. Both reknowned and forgotten travel narratives from the Vormärz and the biogeographical discourse will form the subject of research, e.g. from Heinrich Heine, Ludolf Wienbarg, Theodor Mundt, Adelbert von Chamisso, Richard Schomburgk und Eduard Poeppig. They all have in common that they combine heterogenous, material and abstract objects - fish fins, poetry quotations and systems of government - into a colourful, phenomenal unity. Secondly, the project will look for parallels on the level of media - based on the encyclopedic journal Isis (1816-1848) edited by the natural philosopher Lorenz Oken. This journal has not yet been researched thoroughly. Driven by the paradoxical aspiration both to unite the totality of knowledge and to abandon the culture of savants at the same time, the journal presents a kaleidoscope of the heterogenous, too - from zoological articles to poetry and philosophical reflexion. Step by step, the project will reconstruct specific practices of representation: they transform perceptual richness, acceleration and the loss of order into textuality and thereby make a chaotic reality visible. The spectrum ranges from the combination of incompatible objects or genres and the constant change between narration, description and explanation in travel prose to the connection of linguistic, iconic and numeric sign systems and the deliberate break of genre conventions. Such hybrid formats point to the fact that a overflowing reality and the knowledge it generates can only be grasped by techniques of montage. Such artistic forms of mimesis with the materiality of signs marginalize the auctorial subject who appears as creator and copyist at the same time. All in all, the project aims to uncover - by discussing dissociative types of representation and the ambivalence of the subject associated with it - the actual modernity of epistemological modernism.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland