This roundtable discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and illustrate historiographical and methodological questions at a range of examples: Topics include the emergence of children's rooms in US consumer magazines; research on the unborn in nineteenth century sciences of development; the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry; German literary discourses about the child's initiation in scripture; and the socio-politics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, 2 childhood emerges as a topic particularly prone to interdisciplinary perspectives that consider the history of science part of a broader history of knowledge. TEXTWith the rise of the human sciences in the late nineteenth century, children became objects of empirical scientific investigation. A multitude of new disciplines, including paediatrics, child studies, child psychology, pedagogy, and ergonomics, inaugurated experimental and psychophysical exploration: the performance of children was measured with new technological devices such as the ergograph and the Ästhesiometer; the working of their minds analysed in drawings and toy-usage; their learning abilities assessed in laboratories and experimental settings; their behaviour disciplined through educational programs and ergonomically designed working environments. 1 This developing scientific and material culture focused on the child was mirrored, multiplied and countered in artistic, cultural and social discourses; be it in the booming genre of school-literature, reform pedagogical projects, or political agendas of 'Staatsbürgerliche Erziehung,' 2 knowledge about children figured centre stage in the public sphere. 3 The diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood makes childhood a test case for recent historiographical approaches and methodological discussions in the history of science. In particular, it lends itself to histories of knowledge that no longer conceptualize science as a distinct enterprise but rather as a cultural practice that does not necessarily differ fundamentally from other cultural practices, including literature, arts and even household activities. 4 However, approaching scientific and cultural practices as part of an interdisciplinary 3 history of knowledge poses particular methodological challenges. How do we deal, for instance, with a diverse set of analytic tools and how do we relate different forms of knowledge to each other? What kind of historical claims can be made on the basis of literary (i.e. fictional) texts and objects of...
This article traces some of the fundamental poetological changes that the traditional crime novel undergoes in the work of the Swiss author Friedrich Glauser at the beginning of the 20th century. The rational-analytical, conservative approach of the criminal novel in the 19th century implied – according to Luc Boltanski – the separation of an epistemologically structured, institutionalized order of “reality” and a chaotic, unruly, unformatted “world” – a separation that is questioned, but reestablished in the dramaturgy of crime and its resolution. By shifting the attention from the logical structure of ‘whodunnit’ to the sensual material culture and “atmosphere” that surrounds actions and people, Glauser’s novels blur these epistemological and ontological boundaries. The article shows how in Die Fieberkurve, the second novel of Glauser’s famous Wachtmeister Studer-series, material and sensual substances develop a specific, powerful dynamic that dissipates, complicates, crosslinks, and confuses the objects and acts of investigation as well as its narration. The material spoors, dust, fibers, fingerprints, intoxicants and natural resources like oil and gas – which lead the investigation from Switzerland to North Africa – trigger a new sensual mode of perception and reception that replaces the reassuring criminological ideal of solution by the logic of “dissolution”. The novel thereby demonstrates the poetic impact of the slogan of modernity: matter matters.
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