Appropriating the World in Writing. Travel Texts by Natural Scientists in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

• Applicant: Dr. Monika Sproll
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 427625659

This project explores the travel writings of natural scientists within the reflexive turn in literary and scientific modernity that shaped the Vormärz era (1815 – 1848). My focus attends to natural scientists who today stand in Humboldt’s shadow and whose works have not been handed down past the nineteenth century, neither as literature nor as scholarship. This network of globally active natural scientists was organized around Adelbert von Chamisso and included Johann Friedrich Eschscholtz, Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, Georg Adolph Erman, Karl Heinrich Mertens, Eduard Friedrich Poeppig, Franz Julius Ferdinand Meyen and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius. Their texts examine and review empirical knowledge, while also incorporating literary elements in descriptions of nature and culture.Their travel manuscripts, letters and works are distinguished by diverse writing processes: 1) Their narratives are historicizing and theorizing, synthesizing and systematizing, knowledge-generating and hypothetical, descriptive and explorative, serial and shaped by data. At the same time, the texts have performative elements: 2) they narrate in the mode of testifying and in critical recursions, in anecdotal, biographical and perspectival ways, in subjective experiences, authorial and evaluative, skeptically and with rhetorical tools. My analysis concentrates on the narrative processes with which these authors navigate the boundaries of the two systems of art and science. Both in terms of scholarship and literary studies, the question remains fully open as to whether, to what extent, and by what means the writing of these authors was epistemic and literary, and whether their works comprised units and/or divisions of knowledge and narrative.The project is organized in two steps that will assess the emergence of a specific textual culture of natural science in the Vormärz period, combining analytical methods centering on writing processes, on the history of science and literature, and narratological approaches. First, I will analyze the literary production of this generation of world travelers – handwritten travel journals and travel correspondence – to articulate the textual organization of the travel and writing process in relation to empirical knowledge and in the respective contexts of the “experimental cultures” (Rheinberger) of their global journeys. Second, with a view to the narratological form of these texts of knowledge, I examine how this group of authors redesigned their texts for publication. This approach will describe the conceptual poetics of travel narratives in the context of the history of science and literature, while simultaneously showing how a commentary, expansion and/or transgression of this culture of knowledge in the Vormärz period arose from close recursive reference to travel notes in the process of revision.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants