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

以写作方式挪用世界。

• 批准号: 427625659
• 负责人: Dr. Monika Sproll
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Fach Germanistik
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2018-12-31 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/427625659?language=en
• 关键词: Appropriating; World; Writing.; Travel; Texts

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.

该项目探讨了自然科学家在文学和科学现代性的反思性转变中的旅行著作，这种转变塑造了福尔马茨时代（1815 - 1848）。我的重点是自然科学家，他们今天站在洪堡的阴影下，他们的作品在十九世纪之后就没有流传下来，无论是作为文学作品还是学术作品。这个网络由活跃于全球的自然科学家组成，以阿德尔伯特·冯·查米索为中心，成员包括约翰·弗里德里希·埃施肖尔茨、克里斯蒂安·戈特弗里德·埃伦伯格、格奥尔格·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·马蒂斯。他们的文本审视和回顾经验知识，同时也将文学元素融入对自然和文化的描述中。他们的旅行手稿、信件和作品以不同的写作过程而著称：1）他们的叙述是历史化和理论化、综合和系统化、知识生成和假设、描述性和探索性、连续性和数据塑造的。同时，文本也具有表演元素：2）它们以证言和批判的递归方式进行叙述，以轶事、传记和视角的方式，以主观经验、作者和评价的方式，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跨越艺术和科学两个体系界限的叙事过程上。无论是在学术还是文学研究方面，这些作者的写作是否、在何种程度上以及通过何种方式是认知性和文学性的，以及他们的作品是否包含知识和叙事的单元和/或部门，这些问题仍然是完全开放的。该项目分为两个步骤，将评估福尔马茨时期自然科学的特定文本文化的出现，结合以写作过程、科学和文学史为中心的分析方法，以及 叙事学方法。首先，我将分析这一代世界旅行者的文学作品——手写的旅行日记和旅行信件——以阐明与经验知识相关的旅行和写作过程的文本组织以及他们全球旅行的“实验文化”（莱茵伯格）各自的背景。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。这种方法将在科学史和文学史的背景下描述旅行叙事的概念诗学，同时展示对福尔马茨时期这种知识文化的评论、扩展和/或超越是如何在修订过程中通过对游记的密切递归参考而产生的。