10 - 12 September 2009

According to common scholarly opinion, the eighteenth century is not an era particularly famous for its groundbreaking scientific discoveries. Considering the innovations in the so-called life sciences, e.g. the emergence of modern neuroscience or the experiments of Galvani, this belief may be disputed. Although the eighteenth century undoubtedly also has to be characterized, as the late Roy Porter has pointed out, by the terms “acceptance”, “consolidation”, and “assimilation”, the scientific landscape of the era, as latest research has emphasized, is much more complex and has a lot more to offer. In this context, the conference will focus on the life sciences, i.e. medicine, natural philosophy, physiology, psychology, and, at the close of the century, the emerging discipline of biology, in order to highlight how the discovery of the human is both the result of transformative processes as well as new discoveries and insights.

For the contemporary concept of the human, these transformations were indeed groundbreaking since they brought about a shift from the previous worldview dominated by religion to the modern scientific one. Science, hence, became an accepted cultural reality in the age of reason and in romanticism and was, as such, reflected, commented on, and criticized in literature and other cultural discourses. At the same time, traditional religious viewpoints remained of major importance in all major scientific disciplines. The conference aims to reflect the parallel and often contradictory discourses contributing to the construction and/or discovery of the human.

As the concept of the human was altered due to the gradual spreading of scientific knowledge, so did the depiction of the human change in literature and the arts. Since the two cultures, art and science, were not yet distinguished categories but rather closely intertwined, the modern concept of the human is a result of scientific-aesthetic negotiations.

The complex debates revolving around mechanism, vitalism, and materialism in order to define the nature of life in general are a case in point. The mechanistic physiology in the tradition of René Descartes that had replaced classical medical models such as the theory of the four humours gradually, as the century proceeded, made way for more holistic notions such as vitalism and a materialism based on the conception of the human and animal body as a self-sufficient organism, which is the prerequisite for the discovery of the human. And at times it is hard to say whether central texts, such as the works of Erasmus Darwin, are to be called science or poetry.

Program

Thursday, 10 September 2009

Dorotheenstr. 24, Reutersaal

17.30-20.00 Registration at the Reutersaal, Dorotheenstr. 24

18.00 Conference Opening and Welcome Address
by Michael Kämper-van den Bogaart, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities II

18.30 Plenary Lecture: George S. Rousseau (Oxford): 'Nervous Energies, Structural Forms, and Pictures in the Mind: Confronting the Language of the Soul'

20.30 Chamber Concert
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Klaviertrio Op. 49
George Rousseau (Grand Piano), Serge Verheylewegen (Violin), SoJung Lee (Cello)

Conference Warming

Friday, 11 September 2009
All day Registration at Dorotheenstr. 24, 1.501

Unter den Linden 6, 1064a

8.30-9.00 Sabine Blackmore & Ralf Haekel (Berlin & Göttingen) Introduction

9.00-9.45 Sharon Ruston (Salford): ʻRomanticism and Vitalityʼ

Dorotheenstr. 24, 1.501

9.45-10.15 Coffee Break
10.15-12.00 Imke Pannen (Bonn): ʻFinchʼs Spleenʼ

Christoph Heyl (Frankfurt/Main): ʻWilliam Hogarth, Science and Human Natureʼ

Armina Grunewald (Berlin): ʻThe Art of Anatomyʼ

12.00-14.00 Lunch

14.00-15.15 Hania Siebenpfeiffer (Wien/Greifswald): ʻ(Imagining) First Contact: Literary Encounters of the extraterrestrial Other in 17th and 18th-centuries novelsʼ

Sladja Blazan (New York/Berlin): ʻIn Light of the Enlightenment: The Irrationalʼ

15.15-15.45 Coffee Break

15.45-15.00 Felix C. H. Sprang (Hamburg): ʻThe Life of Plants and the Discovery of the Human in Erasmus Darwinʼs The Botanic Garden (1799) and Hugo von Mohlʼs Über den Bau und das Winden der Ranken und Schlingpflanzen (1827)ʼ

Catherine Clinger (Montreal): ʻBelow the Surface: The Cavernous Culture of Ear, Nose, and Throat Medicine in the Romantic Ageʼ

18.00 Conference Dinner

Saturday, 12 September 2009

9.00-10.15 Helga Schwalm (Berlin): ʻLives of the Scientistsʼ

Mascha Gemmecke (Greifswald): ʻ“Scientific Wives”: Eighteenth-Century Women and Sciencesʼ

10.15-10.45 Coffee Break

10.45-12.30 Birgit Kaiser (Utrecht): ʻElectrified humans - intersecting ideas of the human and life in early Romanticismʼ

Ulrike Kristina Köhler (Lüneburg): ʻWomen and Science in the Female Gothic. A Subtle Pledge for Female Education in Scienceʼ

Ute Berns (Berlin): ʻFrankensteinian Science in Mary Shelleyʼs Novel its Visualization on Filmʼ

12:30-14:00 Lunch

14.00-15.15 Ben Dawson (London): ʻThe Self-Experience of the Romantic ʻActionistʼʼ

Antje Dallmann (Berlin): ʻ“Victim of Menʼs Ingenuity and of Thwarted Nature”: The Wicked Doctor, Evil Science, and the Creation of a Monstrous Human Body In Nathaniel Hawthorne ʻs Fictionʼ

15.15-15.45 Coffee Break

15.45-17.00 Annika Lingner (Leipzig): ʻ“Wir drehen uns eine Zeitlang in diesem Platz herum wie die anderen Räder.” Between Mechanism and Vitalism – on the Mediality of the body in Goetheʼs Götz von Berlichingenʼ

Tobias Leibold (Bochum): ʻCommunication between the Nervous Systems – Romanticist Neuroanatomy in G.H. Schubertʼs Worksʼ

Organisation:
Sabine Blackmore (HU Berlin) and
Ralf Haekel (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)

www.discoveringthehuman.com