Performing Knowledge, 1750-1850

✍ Scribed by Mary Helen Dupree (editor); Sean B. Franzel (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 384
• Series: Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies; 18
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The period between 1750 and 1850 was a time when knowledge and its modes of transmission were reconsidered and reworked in fundamental ways. Social and political transformations, such as the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, went hand in hand with in new ways of viewing, sensing, and experiencing what was perceived to be a rapidly changing world. This volume brings together a range of essays that explore the performance of knowledge in the period from 1750 to 1850, in the broadest possible sense. The essays explore a wide variety of literary, theatrical, and scientific events staged during this period, including scientific demonstrations, philosophical lectures, theatrical performances, stage design, botany primers, musical publications, staged Schiller memorials, acoustic performances, and literary declamations. These events served as vital conduits for the larger process of generating, differentiating, and circulating knowledge. By unpacking the significance of performance and performativity for the creation and circulation of knowledge in Germany during this period, the volume makes an important contribution to interdisciplinary German cultural studies, performance studies, and the history of knowledge.

✦ Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750–1850
Part One: Sounds and Stages
The Making of Acoustics around 1800, or How to Do Science with Words
The Fate of Rhetoric in the “Long” Eighteenth Century
Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship in Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments
The Sound of Glass: Transparency and Danger
Early Schiller Memorials (1805–1808) and the Performance of Literary Knowledge
Modern Architecture Takes the Stage: Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Architectural Spectacles
Part Two: Pedagogies and Publics
Performance and Play: Lichtenberg’s Lectures on Experimental Physics
Kant on the Logic of Anthropology and the Ethics of Disciplinarity
Staging the Knowledge of Plants: Goethe’s Elegy “The Metamorphosis of Plants”
Playing to the Public: Performing Politics in Heinrich von Kleist
Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Forms of Musical Knowledge: The Case of the Piano
Afterword: The Audience, the Public, and the Improvisator Maximilian Langenschwarz
Bibliography
Index