Dissertation Research: A wonderful world of reason and imagination': The Production and Representation of Automata in Late Enlightenment and Early Romantic Germany 1750-1820

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation research proposal requests support to improve a dissertation on the construction and representation of automata in Late Enlightenment and Early Romantic Germany (1750-1820). The dissertation will investigate the ways in which "artificial humans", their philosophical accounts, their epistemological use, and their literary representation intersected with each other in this particular time period. The project will analyze this complex on three different levels. On the level of epistemology and natural philosophy, it will explore how automata were constructed both as models of the embodied individual and as models of the human inquirer into nature. On the level of literary and symbolic representation, it will look at the ways in which automata were productive in provoking accounts or ideas of the extent to which humans are machines, and the extent to which machines are human. Exemplary sources for this level of analysis are literary accounts. German-speaking writers in this period are well-known for their explorations of "Maschinenmenschen". On the level of the actual material artifacts, finally, it will investigate closely the nature and the functioning of various automata, taking them seriously as historical "sources". The project presupposes that artifacts in general inevitably suggest, and often require, specific kinds of reactions and interactions on the part of a user or on the part of a spectator, and it thus aims to develop an acute sense of their limits and capabilities both as highly sophisticated exemplars of craftsmanship as well as devices that provoked thought and wonder. Very important exemplars of automata are to be found in museums all over continental Europe, in particular in Munich, Vienna, Paris and Neuchatel (Switzerland). . Funds will support research expenses to museums and archives in Munich, Neuchatel, Switzerland, Cambridge, UK, and Paris, as well as the Jena area. Textual resources that relate directly to the automata are available in the respective archives of the museums. Funds also support visual recording equipment.