Unexpected Bodies in Eighteenth-Century German Culture

Abstract

Unexpected Bodies in Eighteenth-Century German Culture Patricia Anne Simpson and Birgit Tautz Since the 1990s, interdisciplinary scholarship has been reframing a discourse about "extraordinary" bodies (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson) and the cultural construction of these as "unexpected" from a range of perspectives, including queer studies, intersectional feminism, posthumanism, disability studies, ecocriticism, and critical race theory. Garland-Thomson's path-breaking work decisively shifted a medicalized discourse to another register. Her intervention has reverberated across academic disciplines and activist platforms alike. The body—erroneously presumed to be human—continues to organize inquiry into the limits of the human. Although scholarship about the body frequently reflects presentist perspectives, eighteenth-century aesthetics, with anthropocentric roots in Enlightenment thought and totalizing tendencies derived from assumptions about the body as a self-identical, logical "whole" likewise offer extensive material for the analysis of bodies beyond the human. In a previous "Forum on (New) Directions" (2021), two contributions, in particular, highlight the innovation related to "unexpected" bodies in our field. Stephanie M. Hilger's"Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century" calls attention to the health humanities, which "allow for a fresh perspective"; she elaborates: "Eighteenth-century thinkers wrestled with the separation of the humanities/mind from the sciences/body, yet they rarely questioned the supremacy of the mind."1 Eleoma Bodammer's "Disability Studies and New Directions in Eighteenth-Century German Studies" seeks to extend the model of critical disability studies to our field, encouraging a discussion that "could take a variety of directions that might help to explain responses to disability in aesthetic theories, debates on humanity, and the history of emotions."2 This, the final forum section of our editorship, builds beyond the horizons of the medical humanities and critical disability studies by foregrounding the cultural construction of the "body" and all its articulations in the eighteenth century. The contributions impressively show that, although anthropomorphic beliefs about the wholeness of the body frequently seek to ground and legitimize themselves in the eighteenth century, the actual historical landscape was much more porous, multifaceted, and in flux, indeed decentering anthropocentric mindsets, creative dispositions, and perspectives on eighteenth-century literature, culture, and the body. [End Page 137] The contributions to this forum bring the "unexpected" bodies into focus: they are extraordinary, anomalous, amorphous. Inspired by two panels sponsored by the LLC Forum Executive Committee on Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century German Literature, the contributors contemplate a range of human and nonhuman bodies marked by gender, ability, race, anomaly, and associations in the material and ecological environment. Bodies of water, plant life, bewitched bodies, and aesthetic, "uncontainable" bodies—all invite an innovative reimagining of German-speaking European literature and culture in multiple representations of nonnormative, nonconforming bodies. Patricia Anne Simpson University of Nebraska-Lincoln Bowdoin College Birgit Tautz University of Nebraska-Lincoln Bowdoin College NOTES 1. Stephanie M. Hilger," Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century," Goethe Yearbook 28 (2021): 301–06, here 304. 2. Eleoma Bodammer, "Disability Studies and New Directions in Eighteenth-Century German Studies," Goethe Yearbook 28 (2021): 307–313, here 310. Supplemental Bibliography Allingham, Liesl. "Gender and Narrative Crisis in Christoph Martin Wieland's 'Novella without a Title.'" The Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation 56, no. 4 (2015): 427–44. Google Scholar Calzoni, Raul and Greta Perletti. Monstrous Anatomies: Literary and Scientific Imagination in Britain and Germany during the Long Nineteenth Century. Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2015. Google Scholar Dale, Amelia. The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2019. Google Scholar Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Google Scholar Deutsch, Helen and Felicity Nussbaum, eds. Defects: Engendering the Modern Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000. Google Scholar Engelstein, Stefani. Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse. Albany: SUNY P, 2009. Google Scholar Farr, Jason S. Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2019. Google Scholar Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Google Scholar ———. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Google Scholar ———, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles...