The case of literature : forensic narratives from Goethe to Kafka / / Arne Höcker.

• Superior document: Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought
• VerfasserIn: Höcker, Arne,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca : : Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library,, 2021.
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought.; Cornell scholarship online.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (250 pages).
• Notes: "A Signale book."; Previously issued in print: 2020.

This text offers a radical reassessment of the modern European literary canon. The book's reinterpretations of Goethe, Schiller, Buchner, Doblin, Musil, and Kafka show how literary and scientific narratives have determined each other over the past three centuries, and it 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. Arne Höcker 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 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 -- 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 -- 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