Mediating the Nineteenth Century:Literature, Science, and the History of Knowledge Jessica C. Resvick (bio) My research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literature, media, and material culture draws from the histories of science and ideas to study how media shape what we know. I am working on two book projects, each of which explores how literature and media produce and codify new knowledge and new ways of knowing. My first book project, Recognizing Reality: German Realism and the Transmission of Knowledge, examines the media-historical and epistemological parameters of nineteenth-century German realism. I take as a starting point Aristotle's concept of recognition, understood as that "aha" moment that occupies a cornerstone of the complex plot and the basic operation that underlies the human proclivity for mimesis. In Aristotle's account, it is by recognizing the identity of a newly perceived object with known representations held in memory that one gains knowledge about the world, and this pleasurable recognitive work in fact lies at the root of literary creation. My project exploits this paradigm as it investigates the kinds of knowledge transmitted by works of nineteenth-century realism, for which mimesis becomes an especially pressing concern. Beginning with a rereading of the scar episode in the Odyssey—and of Erich Auerbach's reading of this scene—the book proposes that realist recognition short-circuits the experience of reality with knowledge about reality, with the former remaining beyond the reach of linguistic expression and the latter underpinned by specific media. [End Page 132] While recognition has always occupied a central role in literature, its status has shifted over the centuries in ways that reflect developments in media. For instance, Bertolt Brecht's epic theater strove to disrupt routinized processes of recognition to generate V-Effekte in the audience. By attending, for example, to the serial publication format, specific writing and drawing aids, or even personal doodles, I show how contemporary media in fact condition the types of knowledge conveyed in realist narratives. Moreover, I show how early theories of realism—generally understood as a prose-dominant period—drew explicitly from theatrical forms of recognition. The project, then, highlights at once the media-specificity of recognition and the epistemological influence of specific media. Finally, by tracing out the influence of nineteenth-century literature and media on early psychoanalysis, the project shows how German realism lays the groundwork not only for modern conceptions of recognition but also—and more suggestively—for new conceptions of the individual's lived experience within and of modern reality. My second book project, From Stereotype to Isotype: Media, Individuality, and Society, provides a media history of "typological" thought in the German and American contexts. Examining scientific, literary, and visual types—from the Goethean Typus to typefaces—the project illustrates how typological thought spread far beyond its original contexts. For instance, the commonplace term "stereotype" in fact originally designated a print technology that allowed for the reproduction of stock images or texts. While this association seems lost today, in the early twentieth century, the medial conception of the stereotype was still in force. Thus, in his 1912 essay "The Dynamics of Transference," Sigmund Freud could, without much justification, liken an individual's recurrent patterns of instinctual satisfaction to this print technology. The history of the term "stereotype" is, I contend, more broadly indicative of the transfer of "type" across disciplines at the turn of the century. The "social type" occupied a central role in nineteenth-century fiction, even beyond the strictures of Marxist criticism that deemed it "the central category and criterion of realist literature."1 It was above all the industrialization of print and the resultant rise of periodical literature—in which stereotype printing played a key role—that helped to solidify clichéd representations of individuals and reality more broadly.2 Typological thinking also permeated the (pseudo-) sciences of the day. Literary constructions of the social type were shaped by fields like phrenology and physiology, and so-called race science attempted to categorize humankind based on phenotypical differences.3 While links between the social type and the stereotype—understood both as a print technology and in its contemporary sense—are thus readily apparent, strategies of...
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Apr 26, 2023
Rachel L Knight + 6
Open Access
