The Emergence of the Concept of Opposite Sexes around 1800 in German Literature, Science, and Nature Philosophy
FAIN: FEL-289136-23
Stefani B. Engelstein
Duke University (Durham, NC 27705-4677)
Research and writing leading to a book on the scientific concept of “Opposite Sexes” in 19th-century German scientific and scholarly discourse.
A 12-month NEH fellowship will enable me to complete a book, The Making of the Opposite Sex, that will investigate how sex came to be viewed as opposite rather than merely other. As naturalists shifted focus from anatomy to physiology, this oppositional sexual dynamic emerged in science, medicine, literature, and philosophy, all fields in dialogue. In various thinkers, the polarity came to ground definitions of the organism; the workings of all life; the possibility of empirical knowledge; the existence of the objective world beyond subjective imaginings; human ethical interactions; and even an originary heterogeneity as the condition of possibility for differentiated existence as such. My book will focus on the German-speaking world in which sexual polarity emerged. It will conclude by analyzing the resurgence of the model in the US in the last 30 years. My research will illuminate from a scholarly standpoint why the concept has proven so intertwined with social values for so long.
Associated Products
Death Writes: Franz Kafka, Tubercular Soundscapes, and the Place of Literature (Article)Title: Death Writes: Franz Kafka, Tubercular Soundscapes, and the Place of Literature
Author: Stefani Engelstein
Abstract: Analyzing previously unexplored medical records of Franz Kafka, this article reveals the significance of tubercular lung sounds—internal yet inaudible to the patient—for his penultimate story, “The Burrow.” Modern audio recordings of the sounds described for Kafka's lungs are included. The asymmetrical access to sound is transformed in "The Burrow" into a narrative technique for exploring the relationship between the incommensurable positionalities of fictional and authorial worlds. Created as an external eavesdropper on its author’s breathing, the burrowing animal protagonist responds to the sound not only with anxiety but also with an expanded imaginative capacity, inventing in turn a creator god in its own image—a portrait of the author as a great beast. The text thus becomes a reflection on the legacy an author leaves behind, one that refuses presence in favor of strange representation. The involuted structure and the temporal paradox that results allow the text to mark proleptically the death of its own author.
Drawing on sound studies, medical humanities, and text-immanent critique, this article traces the unequal access to the
sound of the author’s breath by author, narrator, and, ultimately, reader as a series of encounters and provocations that transform capacities and faculties and perturb time and space.
Year: 2024
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: New German Critique
Divisive Affect, Loyalty, and National Cohesion: Du Bois contra Wagner (Article)Title: Divisive Affect, Loyalty, and National Cohesion: Du Bois contra Wagner
Author: Stefani Engelstein
Abstract: The question of divisive affect and national cohesion has been placed at the center of debates in the United States over curricula dealing with race, but the problem is not a new one. Several European thinkers of the late-nineteenth through early-twentieth century theorized affect in the context of social cohesion, including Richard Wagner, Ernest Renan, and Georg Simmel. W. E. B. Du Bois, the author argues, lays bare the power dynamics of these intersecting views in his short story, “The Coming of John” in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois recognizes and critiques a specific strategy that he finds most clearly crystallized in Wagner, who advocates building and transmitting national allegiance by suppressing historical knowledge, fostering affective attachment to the nation, and excluding dissenters. Philologist Ernest Renan and sociologist Georg Simmel elaborate on the temporal dimensions of these mechanisms. In conversation with these theories, Du Bois illustrates in “The Coming of John” a stickiness of time—reiteration rather than reconciliation—arising from the reciprocally reinforcing functions of loyalty and ignorance of the past. While Du Bois here also employs methods for re-engaging historical time, the difficulty of moving beyond past social structures reemerges in his later works.
Year: 2023
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Comparative Literature
Sketchy! Kafka’s Drawings in medias res (Article)Title: Sketchy! Kafka’s Drawings in medias res
Author: Stefani Engelstein
Abstract: This essay traces the ways in which Kafka’s drawings position themselves adamantly in the middle of things: temporally both through the foregrounding of their own becoming and through dynamic evocations of motion, as well as interpersonally through networks of performance and observation. The article juxtaposes images with texts such as “Wunsch, Indianer zu werden,” “Der Kübelreiter,” and sections of letters that describe the process of drawing to argue for a generative rather than privative sense of incomplete becoming that functions differently in the two media. It also explores how meanings arise and vary through relation and perspective. The images reflect self-referentially on the visual medium through depicted acts of observation, and also offer a visual commentary on textuality through expressive portraits of Kafka’s own relatives reading. The drawings’ sketchiness—their dynamic refusal of closure enables a theory of humor in Kafka’s work as arising from the way the viewer is “drawn into” the images. The recognition of one’s own implication in this prolific openness of bodies and in the always-undercut drive to find meanings reveals the
Year: 2023
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Germanic Review
Polarisierender Affekt, Öffentlichkeit und nationaler Zusammenhalt: Du Bois contra Wagner (Book Section)Title: Polarisierender Affekt, Öffentlichkeit und nationaler Zusammenhalt: Du Bois contra Wagner
Author: Stefani Engelstein
Editor: Christian Moser
Editor: Seán Allan
Abstract: German translation of "Divisive Affect, Loyalty, and National Cohesion: Du Bois contra Wagner":
The question of divisive affect and national cohesion has been placed at the center of debates in the United States over curricula dealing with race, but the problem is not a new one. Several European thinkers of the late-nineteenth through early twentieth century theorized affect in the context of social cohesion, including Richard Wagner, Ernest Renan, and Georg Simmel. W. E. B. Du Bois, the author argues, lays bare the power dynamics of these intersecting views in his short story, “The Coming of John” in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois recognizes and critiques a specific strategy that he finds most clearly crystallized in Wagner, who advocates building andtransmitting national allegiance by suppressing historical knowledge, fostering affective attachment to the nation, and excluding dissenters. Philologist Ernest Renan and sociologist Georg Simmel elaborate on the temporal dimensions of these mechanisms. In conversation with these theories, DuBois illustrates in “The Coming of John” a stickiness of time—reiteration rather than reconciliation— arising from the reciprocally reinforcing functions of loyalty and ignorance of the past. While Du Bois here also employs methods for re-engaging historical time, the difficulty of moving beyond past social structures reemerges in his later works.
Year: 2024
Publisher: Aisthesis
Book Title: Re-Imagining the Public Sphere. Literatur, Kunst und das soziale Imaginäre
ISBN: 978-3849819675
Geschwister-Logik. Genealogisches Denken in der Literatur und den Wissenschaften der Moderne. (Book)Title: Geschwister-Logik. Genealogisches Denken in der Literatur und den Wissenschaften der Moderne.
Author: Stefani Engelstein
Abstract: Translation of Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2017):
The sibling stands out as a ubiquitous – yet unacknowledged – conceptual touchstone across the European long nineteenth century. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Europeans embarked on a new way of classifying the world, devising genealogies that determined degrees of relatedness by tracing heritage through common ancestry. This methodology organized historical systems into family trees in a wide array of new disciplines, transforming into siblings the closest contemporaneous terms on trees of languages, religions, races, nations, species, or individuals. In literature, a sudden proliferation of siblings – often incestuously inclined – negotiated this confluence of knowledge and identity. In all genealogical systems the sibling term, not-quite-same and not-quite-other, serves as an active fault line, necessary for and yet continuously destabilizing definition and classification.
In her provocative book, Stefani Engelstein argues that this pervasive relational paradigm shaped the modern subject, life sciences, human sciences, and collective identities such as race, religion, and gender. The insecurity inherent to the sibling structure renders the systems it underwrites fluid. It therefore offers dynamic potential, but also provokes counter-reactions such as isolationist theories of subjectivity, the political exclusion of sisters from fraternal equality, the tyranny of intertwined economic and kinship theories, conflicts over natural kinds and evolutionary speciation, and invidious anthropological and philological classifications of Islam and Judaism. Integrating close readings across the disciplines with panoramic intellectual history and arresting literary interpretations, Sibling Action presents a compelling new understanding of systems of knowledge and provides the foundation for less confrontational formulations of belonging, identity, and agency.
Year: 2023
Primary URL:
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111248073/html?lang=de&srsltid=AfmBOorOhskXyu3WqP3AH_RWeuGZahQ74yEefVum42sPQTJvwKGQuVnvPublisher: De Gruyter
Type: Single author monograph
Type: Translation
ISBN: 978-3111247410
Translator: André Hansen
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes
Franz Kafkas langer Atem. Vor hundert Jahren starb der Schriftsteller. Für die letzten Erzählungen spielten seine Krankenakten eine Hauptrolle (Article)Title: Franz Kafkas langer Atem. Vor hundert Jahren starb der Schriftsteller. Für die letzten Erzählungen spielten seine Krankenakten eine Hauptrolle
Author: Stefani Engelstein
Abstract: Feuilleton newspaper article on 100th anniversary of Kafka's Death
Year: 2024
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Newspaper
Periodical Title: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Boundaries and Interdisciplines: Where Medical Humanities Meets Literature & Science in German Studies (Book Section)Title: Boundaries and Interdisciplines: Where Medical Humanities Meets Literature & Science in German Studies
Author: Stefani Engelstein
Editor: Stephanie Hilger
Abstract: Engelstein traces the history of the transdisciplinary fields of Literature & Science and the Medical Humanities. She notes the ways in which their practices diverge, while also indicating overlaps in interests, particularly within German Studies. Engelstein claims that Literature & Science has retained a commitment to critical literary and visual studies through the post-critical turn, while the Medical Humanities, although still centered in affective readings, has also developed critical tendrils. Finally, she explores both fields in terms of their goals and their relationship to the concept of goals (teleology), and argues that the commitment to a lack of closure inherent in aesthetics and in the fields that study them constitutes a non-instrumental value of its own kind.
Year: 2023
Primary URL:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/health-humanities-in-german-studies-9781350296183/Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
Book Title: Health Humanities in German Studies
ISBN: 9781350296183