H. H. Behr´s Interdisciplinary Writing: A Contribution to the History of the Latent

This project will, for the first time, reconstruct and survey the life and scientific and literary work of the German- American physician, botanist and author Hans Hermann Behr (1812-1904). Upon this foundation, and applying the interdisciplinary premises of cultural theory, the project will analyse the interdependence between knowledge and poiesis to be found in Behr`s oeuvre and the scientific and cultural transfer relationships underlying that interdependence. The spectrum of Behr`s thematisation of knowledge reaches from realist to proto-avantgarde writing. It constitutes a transnational aspect of nineteenth-century cultural history that has so far remained unexplored. Against the backdrop of the current paradigm shift in science ushered in by globalisation and intensified cultural contacts, we regard the development of Behr`s oeuvre as symptomatic of the complex discursive economy of modernity, and especially of talk about alterity. A scholarly edition and a literary-historical evaluation will not only fill an important gap in German studies and American studies, but also raise comparatist questions that will be addressed within a cultural studies framework. The basis of our proposal is to investigate Behr`s transmission of and reflection on knowledge through popular literature, asking how its interlocking of homo scientificus, homo litterarius and homo politicus serves to propagate critical thinking. The first interdisciplinary challenge posed by this undertaking is to deliver a discursive and epistemic analysis of the specific concatenation of the surrounding dominant nineteenth-century discourses. Deploying the forms of the novel and the grotesque to popularise the research aporias of his day and make them commensurable for his audience, Behr deserves investigation as a rare exemplar of the natural scientist writing in an enlightenment mode. If Behr`s use of humour is interpreted as a reference to the experience of latency, and thus as a constitutive epistemological component of modernity, the second interdisciplinary challenge now arises, this time in the history of knowledge: how to systematise humour`s poetological role and its function in the theory of latency. Bearing in mind that cultural-studies oriented philology has not yet exhaustively studied the contribution of literature particularly popular literature to the economy of knowledge and memory during phases of epochal transition such as modernity, and that the call for "Wiedergutmachung historischen Unrechts" 1 (reparations for historical wrongs) lays down one of the chief tasks of current German studies, we consider an engagement with Behr to be promising in terms of both the strategy and the theory of science. A long-overdue detailed enquiry into the epistemology and poetics of Behr`s work will allow us using a rigorous terminology derived from the knowledge-economy of humour to calibrate the manifold theoretical models of the latent that have been established in genealogical and archaeological thinking. 1 Schlaffer, Heinz: Die kurze Geschichte der deutschen Literatur. München-Wien: Carl Hanser 2002, 20.

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