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

这个项目探讨了自然科学家的旅行作品在文学和科学现代性的自反性转向，塑造了Vormärz时代（1815年至1848年）。我关注的是今天站在洪堡阴影下的自然科学家，他们的作品在世纪之后没有流传下来，既没有作为文学也没有作为学术。这个全球活跃的自然科学家网络是围绕Adelbert von Chamisso组织的，包括Johann Friedrich Scholtz，Christian Gottfried Escholberg，Georg Adolph Erman，Karl Heinrich Mertens，Eduard Friedrich Poeppig，Franz Julius Ferdinand Meyen和Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius。他们的游记、书信和作品具有不同的写作过程：（1）历史化与理论化、综合化与系统化、知识生成与假设、描述性与探索性、系列化与数据塑造。同时，文本还具有述行性：（2）叙事方式上，以证明和批判递归的方式，以轶事、传记和透视的方式，以主观经验的方式，以作者的方式和评价的方式，以怀疑的方式和修辞的方式。我的分析集中在叙述过程中，这些作者导航的艺术和科学两个系统的边界。在学术和文学研究方面，这些作者的写作是否、在多大程度上以及通过什么方式是知识性和文学性的，以及他们的作品是否包含知识和叙事的单位和/或部门，这个问题仍然是完全开放的。该项目分为两个步骤，将评估在Vormärz时期自然科学的特定文本文化的出现，结合写作过程的分析方法，科学和文学史，以及叙事学的方法。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--以阐明旅行和写作过程的文本组织与经验知识的关系，以及他们全球旅行的“实验文化”（莱茵贝格）的各自背景。其次，鉴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。这种方法将描述在科学和文学史的背景下旅行叙事的概念诗学，同时显示如何评论，扩展和/或超越这种文化的知识在Vormärz时期从密切递归参考旅行笔记的修订过程中产生。

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.