Typifying the Human. Visual Anthropology and Its Late- and Neo-Victorian Critiques

该项目调查了维多利亚晚期和新维多利亚时代对人类类型的科学、社会学和文学概念的批评，因为它们在19世纪的英国被表达出来。它从一个假设开始，即晚期和新维多利亚时代的文化产品共享一套再现技术，以及一个关键议程，这取决于科学唯物主义文化出现的时刻。因此，它仔细研究了文学类型化的人类学方面，分类模型，凝视制度的表现以及文学，绘画和文化实践中的一系列表现方式。对人脸的典型凝视，它在人类学和民族学新兴学科中的分类，它在监视幻想中的工具化，以及在对被认为是种族退化的恐惧的反应中发展起来的优生措施，被分析为文化困境的症状，其核心是遗传决定论和社会环境的问题关系。环境和生物学如何影响人类类型的概念和感知，反之亦然，规范类型如何与主体的代理和自尊相互作用？这些内在冲突的艺术表现在维多利亚时代晚期的文学和新维多利亚时代的喜剧中强调了科学自然主义的断层线，人类感知的不可靠性以及任何人类表现的不可避免的主观性。像奇幻文学这样的文学模式将这种可见性危机视为现实主义写作的危机，因此可以被认为是原始现代主义；新维多利亚时代的喜剧美学通过求助于分裂和异化的技术，将同样的危机可视化，这些技术同样可以被描述为现代主义技术。通过对维多利亚时代晚期奇幻小说和新维多利亚时代漫画的典型分析，该项目将研究类型化的科学和美学方法之间的相互作用和相互依存关系，以及文学和绘画方式之间的形象和人物描绘。它将追踪面相符号学的内在矛盾，并将分析作为自我民族志文化批判手段的选定文本的潜力。

The project investigates late Victorian and neo-Victorian critiques of the scientific, sociological, and literary conceptions of human types as they were voiced in nineteenth century Britain. It starts from the assumption that late and neo-Victorian cultural productions share a set of representational techniques as well as a critical agenda which hinges on the moment of cultural emergence of scientific materialism. Consequently, it takes a close look at the anthropological side of literary typifications, at taxonomic models, the representation of regimes of the gaze and serial ways of presentation in literary, pictorial and cultural practices. The typifying gaze at the human face, its classification in the emerging disciplines of anthropology and ethnology, its instrumentalisation in fantasies of surveillance, as well as the eugenic measures developed in reaction to fears of what was perceived as racial degeneration are analysed as symptoms of a cultural dilemma at the heart of which is the problematic relation of hereditary determinism and social milieu. How do milieu and biology impact on the conception and perception of human types, and how do, vice versa, normative types interact with the agency and self-esteem of the subjects? The artistic representation of these inherent conflicts in late Victorian literature and in neo-Victorian comic emphasises the fault lines of scientific naturalism, the unreliability of human perception as well as the inevitable subjectivity of any representation of the human. Literary modes like the fantastic enact this crisis of visibility as a crisis of realist writing and could thus be considered proto-modernist; the aesthetics of neo-Victorian comic visualises the same crisis by recourse to techniques of fragmentation and alienation which can likewise be described as modernist techniques. Through exemplary analyses of late Victorian fantastic fiction and neo-Victorian comics the project will investigate the interactions and interdependencies between scientific and aesthetic approaches to typification and between literary and pictorial ways of figuration and character depiction. It will trace the inherent contradictions of a physiognomic semiotics and will analyse the selected texts potential as a means of autoethnographic cultural critique.