Chamisso's world tour
The Acquisition of World Knowledge - Adelbert von Chamisso's World Tour
(Material development, transcription, analysis) DFG Gl 297/25-1 (2015-2018).
In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Walter Erhart from the University of Bielefeld (Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies)
Detailed information on the project (in German)
Summary
Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838) is one of the authors of German literary history who was already canonised in the 19th century, but is now almost unknown. In particular, his natural history writings and the various versions of his journey around the world (1821/1836) have been little researched, and numerous texts and large parts of his correspondence have still not been edited. A still unknown original diary of the world tour (1815-1818) is in the estate of the Berlin State Library; the natural history objects of the world tour, which are treated in many ways in the writings themselves, have only recently been discovered and archived in the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde.
The research project aims to explore the connections between natural history research and literature in the first half of the 19th century; for the first time, it focuses equally on Chamisso the writer and the naturalist. The starting point is the thesis of the central position of world travel (literature) in Chamisso's work; in close cooperation with natural science, history of science and literary studies, the genesis, production and presentation of the natural history knowledge acquired and presented in the process will be reconstructed and analysed. The basis of the project is the transcription, the edition (in print/digital) and the research of the original diary as well as further estate materials. The working group, led by the applicants, a historian of science/zoologist and a literary scholar, is researching the philological-historical components of the travel-literary work, placing them in the scientific-historical context of their time and linking research in the natural sciences and history of science on the emergence and object-related appropriation of natural history (world) knowledge with literary studies on travel-literary and poetic forms of representation.
With the development of new source material as well as the interdisciplinary analysis of all the writings and objects associated with Chamisso's voyage around the world and voyage of discovery, the research project intends to (re)discover an author and explorer who has so far hardly been perceived as a mediator and border crosser between literature and natural history. The study of Chamisso's world travel writings (diaries, travelogues, botanical and zoological studies, poems), conducted in comparison with the exploratory journeys, world travel literature and (natural) science of the 19th century, promises to make a fundamental contribution to the shaping and differentiation of modern cultures of knowledge, to the forms of representation and writing of natural (world) knowledge, as well as to the effective interactions of literature, aesthetics, natural history and ethnology in the history of literature and science of the 19th century.
The appropriation of world knowledge – Adelbert von Chamisso‘s world tour
(transcription, analysis, interpretation)
Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838) numbers among the most famous authors of the 19th century, yet the bulk of his work remains neglected to the present day. Some of his poems and Peter Schlemihl’s wundersame Geschichte belong to the canon of German literature, but Chamisso’s scientific works and the different versions of his Voyage around the world have rarely been studied. The intended research project aims to explore the connections between literature and natural science in the first half of the 19th century. This study gives equal credit to Chamisso the poet and Chamisso the scientist for the first time. The project’s starting point is the hypothesis that his voyage around the world (1815-1818) occupies a central position in the larger body of his work. Combined with his (widely unpublished) letters and his scientific papers, the voyage is essential to the unique literary and scientific persona that the author adopted after his self-proclaimed farewell to romantic poetry around 1813. The basis of this project consists in the transcription, edition and analysis of the—hitherto unstudied—original diaries of Chamisso’s travels (found in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin). The research group combines history of science, zoology, botany and literary criticism to study the genesis, appropriation and representation of botanical, zoological and ethnografic knowledge in Chamisso’s work. In comparison with other world-travel literature and 19th-century natural history, the project elucidates the genuine contribution Chamisso’s travel accounts, scientific work and late poetry made to the modern emergence of different cultures of knowledge as well as separate, i.e. literary, poetic and scientific, ways of seeing the world.