The Case of Literature: Forensic Narratives from Goethe to Kafka (Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought)

In The Case of Literature , Arne Höcker offers a radical reassessment of the modern European literary canon. His reinterpretations of Goethe, Schiller, Büchner, Döblin, Musil, and Kafka show how literary and scientific narratives have determined each other over the past three centuries, and he argues that modern literature not only contributed to the development of the human sciences but also established itself as the privileged medium for a modern style of case-based reasoning. The Case of Literature deftly traces the role of narrative fiction in relation to the scientific knowledge of the individual from eighteenth-century psychology and pedagogy to nineteenth-century sexology and criminology to twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Höcker demonstrates how modern authors consciously engaged casuistic forms of writing to arrive at new understandings of literary discourse that correspond to major historical transformations in the function of fiction. He argues for the centrality of literature to changes in the conceptions of psychological knowledge production around 1800; legal responsibility and institutionalized forms of decision-making throughout the nineteenth century; and literature's own realist demands in the early twentieth century. The Case of Literature Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. Making the Case around 1800 1. The Case of Werther and the Institution of Literature 2. “Observe, Write!”: Histories of Observation and the Psychological Novel Anton Reiser 3. Hot and Cold: History, Casuistry, and Literature in Schiller and Kleist 4. Conclusion: Literary Reference and Authorship Part II. The Case between Psychiatry, Law, and Literature 5. Schmolling, Hoffmann, Hitzig, and the Problem of Legal Responsibility 6. The Drama of the Case: Making the Case of Woyzeck 7. Drama, Anecdote, Case: Wedekind’s Lulu 8. Conclusion: The Fiction of Authority Part III. Novelistic Casuistry 9. Freud’s Cases 10. Fantasy of Facts: Döblin’s Poetics of Uncertainty 11. The Man of Possibilities: Musil’s Moosbrugger 12. Conclusion: The Function of Fiction Bibliography Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Z "This book shows that narrative literature beginning in the late 18th century works out a mode of representing individual cases that exceeds singularity and novelty but stops short of generality and moral didacticism. Two essential questions guide the author's work here: How does this new literature contribute to the establishment of casuistic forms that since the 18th century have been involved in the formation of psychological knowledge and legal decision making? And how, inversely, does the case history contribute to the formation of literary and aesthetic discourses? In answering these questions for the German-language canon, this book contributes to the understanding of how we came to attribute to literature special formative and critical qualities that until today define our cultural self-conception"-- Provided by publisher In __The Case of Literature__, Arne Höcker offers a radical reassessment of the modern European literary canon. His reinterpretations of Goethe, Schiller, Büchner, Döblin, Musil, and Kafka show how literary and scientific narratives have determined each other over the past three centuries, and he argues that modern literature not only contributed to the development of the human sciences but also established itself as the privileged medium for a modern style of case-based reasoning.