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It has become a truism that we all think in the narrative mode,
both in everyday life and in science. But what does this mean
precisely? Scholars tend to use the term ‘narrative’ in a broad
sense, implying not only event-sequencing but also the
representation of emotions, basic perceptual processes or complex
analyses of data sets. The volume addresses this blind spot by
using clear selection criteria: only non-fictional texts by experts
are analysed through the lens of both classical and postclassical
narratology – from Aristotle to quantum physics and from
nineteenth-century psychiatry to early childhood psychology; they
fall under various genres such as philosophical treatises, case
histories, textbooks, medical reports, video clips, and public
lectures. The articles of this volume examine the central but
continuously shifting role that event-sequencing plays within
scholarly and scientific communication at various points in history
– and the diverse functions it serves such as eye witnessing,
making an argument, inferencing or reasoning. Thus, they provide a
new methodological framework for both literary scholars and
historians of science and medicine.
The idea of contagious transmission, either by material particles
or by infectious ideas, has played a powerful role in the
development of the Western World since antiquity. Yet it acquired
quite a precise signature during the process of scientific and
cultural differentiation in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This
volume explores the significance and cultural functions of
contagionism in this period, from notions of infectious
homosexuality and the concept of social contagion to the political
implications of bacteriological fieldwork. The history of the
concept 'microbe' in aesthetic modernism is adressed as well as
bacteriological metaphors in American literary historiography.
Within this broad framework, contagionism as a literary narrative
is approached in more focussed contributions: from its emotional
impact in literary modernism to the idea of physical or psychic
contagion in authors such as H.G. Wells, Kurt Lasswitz, Gustav
Meyrinck, Ernst Weiss, Thomas Mann and Max Frisch. This twofold
approach of general topics and individual literary case studies
produces a deeper understanding of the symbolic implications of
contagionism marking the boundaries between sick and healthy,
familiar and alien, morally pure and impure.
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