The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel

The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel: Poetics of the Brain revises the dominant narrative about the distinctive psychological inwardness and introspective depth of the German novel by reinterpreting the novel's development from the perspective of the nascent discipline of neuroscience, the emergence of which is coterminous with the rise of the novel form. In particular, it asks how the novel's formal properties-stylistic, narrative, rhetorical, and figurative-correlate with the formation of a neuroscientific discourse, and how the former may have assisted, disrupted, and/or intensified the medical articulation of neurological concepts. This study poses the question: how does this rapidly evolving field emerge in the context of nineteenth century cultural practices and what were the conditions for its emergence in the German-speaking world specifically? Where did neuroscience begin and how did it broaden in scope? And most crucially, to what degree does it owe its existence to literature?

Auteur
Sonja Boos was Associate Professor of German at the University of Oregon, USA. Her book Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar German appeared in Cornell University Press' Signale series (2013). Recent publications centered on home movies at the intersection of feminist video art, cinematic materialism and domestic memory practices.

Texte du rabat

The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel: Poetics of the Brain revises the dominant narrative about the distinctive psychological inwardness and introspective depth of the German novel by reinterpreting the novel's development from the perspective of the nascent discipline of neuroscience, the emergence of which is coterminous with the rise of the novel form. In particular, it asks how the novel's formal propertiesstylistic, narrative, rhetorical, and figurativecorrelate with the formation of a neuroscientific discourse, and how the former may have assisted, disrupted, and/or intensified the medical articulation of neurological concepts. This study poses the question: how does this rapidly evolving field emerge in the context of nineteenth century cultural practices and what were the conditions for its emergence in the German-speaking world specifically? Where did neuroscience begin and how did it broaden in scope? And most crucially, to what degree does it owe its existence to literature?

Contenu

1. Introduction

2. Dissecting the Subject: Brain Localization in The Nightwatches of Bonaventura

3. Fiction's Scientific Double: Hallucinations in Jean Paul's Siebenkäs

4. A Tale from the Right Hemisphere: Amusia and Aphasia in Franz Grillparzer's The Poor Musician

5. Symmetry as Narrative Structure: OCD in Gottfried Keller's A Village Romeo and Juliet

6. Writing Against Forgetting: Korsakoff's Syndrome in Theodor Fontane's On Tangled Paths

7. Allegory, Modernity, Learning to See: Cytoarchitectonics in Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

8. Reading Gestures: Body Schema Disorder and Schizophrenia in Franz Kafka's Prose