Signs of Life: Form, Life, and the Materiality of Writing around 1800 (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - Jean Paul - Goethe)

This dissertation examines how concepts of life articulate themselves in the writing practices of German authors around 1800, with particular focus on the works of the Göttingen experimental physicist and writer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the humorist and romantic author Jean Paul, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. While much of the research on this topic is limited to theories of the novel or to the relationship between German Romanticism and the emergence of the field of biology around 1800, I contend that new scientific theories of organic development in the early-19th century introduced a crucial and as yet largely overlooked element into literary representation during this period: that of materiality. In the dissertation, I argue that these author’s works reflect and inform a specifically material conception of life – as corporeal, finite and heterogeneous – which manifests itself at the level of the surface materiality of the texts themselves: the life of the book as “waste” (Chapter I: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg), scholarly life as the contingent combinatory of letters (Chapter II: Jean Paul), and morphology as the science of serial aggregates (Chapter III: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)