Fact and Fiction Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain
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Fact and Fiction Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain Edited by Christine Lehleiter FACT AND FICTION EDITED BY CHRISTINE LEHLEITER Fact and Fiction Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press 2016 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-4598-1 (cloth) Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Fact and ction : literary and scientic cultures in Germany and Britain / edited by Christine Lehleiter. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4598-1 (cloth) 1. German literature – 18th century – History and criticism. 2. English literature – 18th century – History and criticism. 3. Literature and science – Germany – History – 18th century. 4. Literature and science – Great Britain – History – 18th century. 5. Science in literature. 6. Knowledge, Theory of, in literature. I. Lehleiter, Christine, editor II. Title. PT148.S3F32 2016 830.9'36 C2015-905663-2 CC-BY-NC-ND This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivative License. For permission to publish commercial versions please contact University of Toronto Press. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the nancial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement of Canada du Canada Contents Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction. Fact and Fiction: Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain – Thoughts on a Contentious Relationship 1 c h r i s t i n e l e h l e i t e r Part I – Reading: Electricity, Medicine 1 Facts Are What One Makes of Them: Constructing the Faktum in the Enlightenment and Early German Romanticism 33 j o c e ly n h o l l a n d 2 The Competing Structures of Signification in Samuel Hahnemann’s Homeopathy: Between 18th-Century Semiosis and Romantic Hermeneutics 50 a l i c e k u z n i a r Part II – Imagining: Botany, Chemistry, Thermodynamics 3 “She comes! – the GODDESS!”: Narrating Nature in Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden 73 a n n s h t e i r vi Contents 4 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften: The Career of a Metaphor 97 c h r i s t i a n p . w e b e r 5 Physics Disarmed: Probabilistic Knowledge in the Works of James Clerk Maxwell and George Eliot 130 t i n a y o u n g c h o i Part III – Sensing: Anthropology, Psychology, Aesthetics 6 Herder’s Unsettling of the Distinction between Fact and Fiction 155 j o h n k . n o y e s 7 Fictional Feedback: Empirical Souls and Self-Deception in the Magazine for Empirical Psychology and Beyond 175 m i c h a e l h o u s e 8 Fictional Feelings: Psychological Aesthetics and the Paradox of Tragic Pleasure 199 t o b i a s w i l k e Part IV – Relating: Biology 9 Coining a Discipline: Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of Religion 221 s t e fa n i e n g e l s t e i n 10 Kin Selection, Mendel’s “Salutary Principle,” and the Fate of Characters in Forster’s The Longest Journey 247 d a n i e l a u r e l i a n o n e w m a n Part V – Displaying: Scientific Collections 11 Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind: Science, the Body, and Language in the Writings of Durs Grünbein and Thomas Hettche 275 p e t e r m . m c i s a a c Contents vii 12 Vivifying the Uncanny: Ethnographic Mannequins and Exotic Performers in Nineteenth-century German Exhibition Culture 298 a . d a n a w e b e r Contributors 333 Index 337 Illustrations 3.1 Henry Fuseli, “FLORA attired by the ELEMENTS” 90 12.1 Piegan woman 301 12.2 Aboriginal from the Tiwi Islands, Australia 302 12.3 Édouard Joseph Dantan, A Casting from Life 308 12.4 Adolph Menzel, Atelierwand 310 Acknowledgments This volume emerged from a symposium, “Fact and Fiction: Literature and Science in the German and European Context,” which took place at the University of Toronto in spring 2011. The workshop was generously sponsored and supported by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Toronto, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Munk School of Global Affairs, Joint Initiative in German and European Studies (JIGES), and the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES). We gratefully acknowledge the support of these institutions. A thank you to those who helped mount the symposium and guaranteed its smooth running, especially Yasmin Aly, Dale Gebhardt, Gayle Grisdale, Monika Lang, Nicole Perry, Markus Stock, and John Zilcosky. Financial sup- port for the publication of this volume was provided by a SSHRC Aid to Research Workshops Grant. Thanks go also to the Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI) at the Uni- versity of Toronto for its support of a working group on the relationship between “Science and Culture,” initiated by Cannon Schmitt in 2008 and co-organized by Marga Vicedo and Christine Lehleiter in 2010–11. The discussions in this working group inspired the preparations for the sym- posium and it has been gratifying to see that several of its members have become contributors. I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to all contributors for their out- standing engagement with this project and for their patience during the editorial process. We owe special thanks to the two anonymous peer- reviewers for their extremely insightful suggestions and comments. For her copy-editing work in the early stages of the volume’s production Christine Lehleiter Introduction xii Acknowledgments I thank Marlo Burks, for the professional copy-editing John St James, and for help with finishing the indexing Teresa Sudenis. Finally, a deeply felt “thank you” goes to Richard Ratzlaff, our editor at the University of Toronto Press, who supported this project from the moment of its incep- tion and was there with help and advice at every step of the process. Christine Lehleiter Introduction Introduction Fact and Fiction: Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain – Thoughts on a Contentious Relationship c h r i s t i n e l e h l e i t e r The title of this volume alludes to the paradigm of “The Two Cultures,” which became popular through Charles Percy Snow’s Rede lectures delivered in 1959. In these lectures, Snow lamented the divide of the two knowledge-producing systems of the humanities and the sciences.1 Despite the reference to Snow, however, it is not the volume’s aim to represent and solidify an antagonistic formulation of the relationship between scientific and literary cultures. Rather, the articles assembled here investigate Snow’s division between science and the humanities as a historically conditioned and complex phenomenon. When the title refers to literary and scientific cultures, it is with the acknowledgment of this historical complexity and, at the same time, with the recognition that the terminological pair of “literature and science” has become a practical ref- erence for an area of study that is still in its development.2 Towards a Field? Since Snow’s lamentation about the split between scientific and literary worlds and – even more – about the unwillingness of the participants of these cultures to engage with each other’s fields of knowledge, much work has been undertaken in disciplines such as the history of science and liter- ary studies with the goal to develop a clearer picture of the relationship between science and literature and of its historical development. Indeed, there was much excitement two decades ago about the establishment of a new field under the heading ofLiterature and Science. In their 1989 publi- cation, Christie and Shuttleworth expressed the hope that this field would become comparable to research areas such as Gender Studies or Postcolo- nial Theory.3 Similarly, Bruce and Purdy, in their volume Literature and 2 Christine Lehleiter Science (1994), announced the emergence of an “exciting new field” under the name “Literary and Science Studies.”4 However, despite initial excite- ment and optimism, little has materialized in the last decades in terms of an institutional anchoring of such a field. There are few programs in North America that have found promising ways to bring together under one roof scholars trained in distinct disciplines (York University is an example) or to unite them in the context of a scholarly association (the Society for Lit- erature, Science, and the Arts, SLSA, is an exception). These attempts at institutionalizing have remained far and few between. The hesitations and delays in establishing and institutionalizing the field are connected to the realization that it is difficult to formulate a stringent set of questions which this area of study might address. Even before formulating such questions, we would need to ask: how are the terms defined within the field’s name? When we say “literature” and “science,” do we mean a specific historical and disciplinary constellation which became possible once scientific and literary methodologies were defined as separate from each other? Or do we assume a much more gen- erous definition of the terms – running the risk that the title’s distinction, if not the opposition that it claims, becomes void? These questions are difficult to answer. Notwithstanding the difficulties, there is a rich body of work that has tried to address questions such as these.