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

这个项目探索了自然科学家在文学和科学现代性的反身性转向中的旅行作品，这些现代性塑造了沃尔马兹时代(1815-1848)。我关注的是今天站在洪堡阴影下的自然科学家，他们的作品在十九世纪以后还没有流传下来，既不是作为文学作品，也不是作为学术作品。这个活跃在全球的自然科学家网络是围绕Adelbert von Chamisso组织的，其中包括约翰·弗里德里希·埃斯科茨、克里斯蒂安·戈特弗里德·埃伦伯格、乔治·阿道夫·埃尔曼、卡尔·海因里希·默滕斯、爱德华·弗里德里希·波皮格、弗朗茨·朱利叶斯·费迪南德·迈恩和卡尔·弗里德里希·菲利普·冯·马修斯。他们的游记手稿、书信和作品有不同的写作过程：1)他们的叙事是历史化和理论化的，综合和系统化的，知识生成和假设的，描述性和探索性的，系列化的和由数据塑造的。同时，文本也具有表演性因素：2)以证言和批判性递归的方式，以轶事、传记和透视的方式，以主观经验、作者和评价性的方式，以怀疑的方式和修辞工具进行叙述。我的分析集中在这些作者在艺术和科学两个系统的边界之间穿梭的叙事过程。在学术和文学研究方面，这些作者的写作是否具有认识性和文学性，以及他们的作品是否包括知识和叙事的单元和/或部分，这一问题仍然完全悬而未决。该项目分为两个步骤，将评估沃尔玛时期特定的自然科学文本文化的出现，结合以写作过程为中心的分析方法，科学和文学史，以及叙事学方法。首先，我将分析这一代世界旅行者的文学创作--手写旅行日记和旅行信件--以阐明旅行和写作过程中与经验知识相关的文本组织，以及他们环球旅行中各自的“实验文化”(莱茵伯格)的背景。其次，着眼于这些知识文本的叙事形式，我考察了这群作者如何重新设计他们的文本以供出版。这一方法将在科学史和文学史的背景下描述旅行叙事的概念性诗学，同时展示Vormärz时期这种知识文化的评论、扩展和/或越轨是如何在修订过程中反复引用游记而产生的。

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.