Author |
Kuhn, Bernhard |
Year |
2009 |
Publisher |
Farnham: Ashgate |
Number of pages |
171 |
ISBN |
9780754661665 |
Keywords |
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Abstract
Amazon (2013):
Set against the backdrop of a rapidly fissuring disciplinary landscape where poetry
and science are increasingly viewed as irreconcilable and unrelated, Bernhard Kuhn's
study uncovers a previously ignored, fundamental connection between autobiography
and the natural sciences. Examining the autobiographies and scientific writings of
Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau as representative of their ages, Kuhn challenges the
now entrenched thesis of the 'two cultures.' Rather, these three writers are exemplary
in that their autobiographical and scientific writings may be read not as separate
or even antithetical but as mutually constitutive projects that challenge the newly
emerging boundaries between scientific and humanistic thought during the Romantic
period. Reading each writer's life stories and nature works side by side - as they
were written - Kuhn reveals the scientific character of autobiographical writing while
demonstrating the autobiographical nature of natural science. He considers all three
writers in the context of scientific developments in their own times as well as ours,
showing how each one marks a distinctive stage in the growing estrangement of the
arts and sciences, from the self-assured epistemic unity of Rousseau's time, to the
splintering of disciplines into competing ways of knowing under the pressures of specialization
and professionalization during the late Romantic age of Thoreau. His book thus traces
an unfolding drama, in which these writers and their contemporaries, each situated
in an intellectual landscape more fragmented than the last, seek to keep together
what modern culture is determined to break apart.