Papers in English by Philipp Erchinger
Antje Kley and Kai Merten, eds. What Literature Knows: Forays into Literary Knowledge Production. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018
This essay explores the difference between a modern, strongly scientific notion of objective know... more This essay explores the difference between a modern, strongly scientific notion of objective knowledge as 'justified true belief' and literary modes of knowledge production which deliberately replace systematic detachment from with involvement in the matters under consideration. A contrastive case study of an 18th-century dictionary entry on the "Nightingale" and some of John Clare's bird poems exemplifies the difference between articulate and personal knowledge, between what Gilbert Ryle has distinguished as 'knowing that' and 'knowing how'. In contrast to the by then established textbook approach to natural history, Clare's bird poems and natural history letters engage in poetic, process-based forms of investigation that remain sensuously responsive to, and subject to be affected by, the matter they seek to know. Clare's texts enable readers to read an observer's experience in the making and to entertain ecological modes of thinking that challenge the anthropocentric mind.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Drawing on the radical empiricism of William James, this essay seeks to reintegrate the experienc... more Drawing on the radical empiricism of William James, this essay seeks to reintegrate the experience of reading and the reading of experience, both of which are ambiguously condensed in my title. The main argument of the piece hinges on James’s and John Dewey’s claim that experience is »double-barrelled« (James 1977, 172), which is to say that it refers to »the entire process of phenomena«, to quote James’s own definition, »before reflective thought has analysed them into subjective and objective aspects or ingredients« (James 1978, 95). Made up of both perceptions and conceptions, experience, as James views it, is the medium through which everything must have passed before it can be named, and without (or outside of) which nothing, therefore, can be said to exist. With this radical account of empiricism in mind, I revisit some of the assumptions underpinning cognitive literary criticism, before turning to an interpretation of Robert Browning’s »Fra Lippo Lippi« and »An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician«. Ultimately, the purpose of this essay is not only to indicate commonalities between James’s radical empiricism and Browning’s dramatic poetry. More importantly, I wish, by way of this endeavour, also to propose a process- or performance-based corrective, inspired by James and Dewey as much as by contemporary scholars (Ingold, Massumi), to what I regard as a rationalist or intellectualist bias in some representative work in the field of cognitive literary studies (Turner, Zunshine).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 2012
This piece revolves around a terminological distinction between transport and wayfaring which I h... more This piece revolves around a terminological distinction between transport and wayfaring which I have adopted from Tim Ingold. I use this distinction to work through a number of closely related Victorian concerns ranging from epistemology and natural history to the sensation novel and the arrival of the railway.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Philipp Erchinger. "Mobility, Movement, Method and Life in G.H. Lewes". Perspectives on Mobility. Ed. Ingo Berensmeyer and Christoph Ehland. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2013 (Spatial Practices 17), 151-175. , 2013
This essay is centred on a close reading of G.H. Lewes’s 'Studies in Animal Life' and his 'Sea-Si... more This essay is centred on a close reading of G.H. Lewes’s 'Studies in Animal Life' and his 'Sea-Side Studies'. It examines the form and theme of these texts in the context of Victorian concepts of motion and life, including Lewes’s own. While, in the Studies in Animal Life, Lewes’s subject often seems to escape the mode of writing through which he seeks to grasp this subject, I argue, the rambling movement of the Sea Side Studies constitutes a more appropriate way of accommodating the form of studying to the studied theme. For, in this series of texts, Lewes’s method of writing always remains as mobile as the subject-matter – life – that this method seeks to understand. Consequently, the position of the naturalist explorer changes and evolves in conjunction with the objects that it explores. This enables Lewes to bring these objects to life, instead of locking them up in a determinate grid of fixed ideas. But it also means that the position from which he works cannot be reduced to absolute principles or spelled out in final propositional terms. As the article shows, this position is better described as an emergent one, taking shape in practice and over time, ‘growing’ and developing in relation to – and in accordance with – the requirements and challenges of particular situations, rather than on the basis of a general framework interpreting all these situations in the same terms. Lewes’s enactment of this mobile position is consistent with his experimentalist philosophy as it is outlined in his five volume fragment Problems of Life and Mind, another text that not just states, but exemplifies that the “separation of process and product, cause and effect”, as Lewes argues, “is properly a distinction of aspects, not a
separation of reals.”
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Literature Compass, 2012
This essay takes the debate over Darwin’s method of reasoning, by analogy, from ‘artificial selec... more This essay takes the debate over Darwin’s method of reasoning, by analogy, from ‘artificial selection’ to ‘natural selection’ as a sample case to explore some of the epistemological issues that this method raised. It, moreover, explicates the relevance of these issues for the study of Victorian literature. Darwin, I argue, uses the arts of breeding and gardening as a model to study the nature of life, but this broached the question whether a modelled version of nature can be sufficiently similar to nature ‘as it really is’ to warrant the logical step from the one to the other. Indeed, while many other naturalists maintained that human practices of domestication interfere with the laws of nature in an irregular way, making a difference between the ‘cultivated’ and ‘the wild’ that rules out the possibility of claiming them to be alike, Darwin’s argument is premised on the assumption of a continuity between the natural and the cultural according to which these domains have – in the medium of human practice – always already been crossed. As the essay shows, this assumption, encapsulated in the metaphor of ‘natural selection’, implies an integrative concept of ‘nature’ converging with the one that has been spelled out by J.S. Mill, who was involved in a fierce debate with W. Whewell about these matters. For ‘nature’, in Mill’s sense, does not exclude but include the many ways in which it is realised by human culture or art. Science, as a cultural practice, can therefore never fully grasp or domesticate nature from the outside but only – by “moving things into certain places” (Mill) – draw out its potentialities from the inside. The essay concludes by making a case for an approach to Victorian writing which does not cling to a theoretical distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘science’ but analyses how this distinction is, in practice, constantly drawn afresh.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Papers in German by Philipp Erchinger
Rhetorik und Stilistik: Ein internationales Handbuch historischer und systematischer Forschung. Ed. Joachim Knape und Andreas Gardt, vol. 1. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter., 2008
Starting from Plato’s well-known attack on rhetoric, this article outlines some of the major argu... more Starting from Plato’s well-known attack on rhetoric, this article outlines some of the major arguments which have since been advanced against rhetoric, both as a discipline and as a mode of ‘merely artificial’ or figurative speech. Authors to be examined include Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and Immanuel Kant.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Philipp Erchinger. Die Evolution des Textes: Mimikry als Selbstbeschreibungsverfahren (Nashe, Cervantes, Sterne). Mimikry: Gefährlicher Luxus zwischen Natur und Kultur. Ed. Andreas Becker, Martin Doll, Serjoscha Wiemer, Anke Zechner. Schliengen: Edition Argus, 2008, 288-305, 2008
Published in a collection on mimicry and mimesis (eds. A. Becker, M. Doll, S. Wiemer, A. Zechner)... more Published in a collection on mimicry and mimesis (eds. A. Becker, M. Doll, S. Wiemer, A. Zechner), this essay examines the processes whereby texts by Thomas Nashe, Cervantes and Laurence Sterne compose their novel form. As I argue, these texts become what they are by imitating other kinds of art, often the ones they expressly purport not to be themselves.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Philipp Erchinger. "Handlung, Identifikation und Ermöglichung von Differenz: Zur Kreativität der Rhetorik in literaturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive". Kreativität: Kommunikation, Wissenschaft, Künste. Ed. Joachim Knape and Achim Litschko. Berlin: Weidler, 2013 (neue rhetorik 6), 107-133 , 2013
This paper draws out the creative potential of rhetoric as defined by Kenneth Burke. More specifi... more This paper draws out the creative potential of rhetoric as defined by Kenneth Burke. More specifically, it seeks to show, by way of an example, how Burke's concept of rhetorical action can be put to work in the analysis of literary texts.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Special Issue by Philipp Erchinger
Philological Quarterly, 2018
Bringing together six essays by renowned scholars, this special issue on “earth writing,” a liter... more Bringing together six essays by renowned scholars, this special issue on “earth writing,” a literal interpretation of geography, seeks to involve the material existence of the planet humans inhabit (geo) with the practice of extending or translating it into meaningful forms (graphein). The issue contains research articles by Tim Ingold, Fiona Stafford, John Wylie, Ralph Pite, Adelene Buckland, and Christopher F. Loar.
The introductory essay aims to establish a theoretical context for the notion of "earth writing" as well as to situate each of the subsequent contributions within recent debates in ecological criticism and environmental thought.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Call for Papers by Philipp Erchinger
This is a call for papers for an issue of Ecozon@, to be published in autumn 2021. Taking its cue... more This is a call for papers for an issue of Ecozon@, to be published in autumn 2021. Taking its cue from David Fairer’s concept of “Eco-Georgic” (2011), the project proceeds from the assumption that the georgic mode, with its interest in the messy involvement of human and nonhuman action, resonates with current debates in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Like much work in this field (Abram 1996, Alaimo 2010, Bennett 2010, Moore 2015), georgic literature often presents human culture as a way of working through, rather than being opposed to, nature. The daily work of sustaining, understanding, refining, and transforming human existence, it suggests, is inextricably caught up in, rather than separate from, the evolution of non-human matter and life. Last but not least, the georgic tradition affords a consideration of the changing functions of literature. For georgic has always reflected the use of the pen through the work of the plough, creating analogies between the making of poetry and the cultivation of the land.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Papers in English by Philipp Erchinger
separation of reals.”
Papers in German by Philipp Erchinger
Special Issue by Philipp Erchinger
The introductory essay aims to establish a theoretical context for the notion of "earth writing" as well as to situate each of the subsequent contributions within recent debates in ecological criticism and environmental thought.
Call for Papers by Philipp Erchinger
separation of reals.”
The introductory essay aims to establish a theoretical context for the notion of "earth writing" as well as to situate each of the subsequent contributions within recent debates in ecological criticism and environmental thought.