The Case of Literature

In The Case of Literature, Arne Höcker offers a radical reassessment of the modern European literary canon. His reinterpretations of Goethe, Schiller, Büchner, Döblin, Musil, and Kafka show how literary and scientific narratives have determined each other over the past three centuries, and he argues that modern literature not only contributed to the development of the human sciences but also established itself as the privileged medium for a modern style of case-based reasoning.

The Case of Literature deftly traces the role of narrative fiction in relation to the scientific knowledge of the individual from eighteenth-century psychology and pedagogy to nineteenth-century sexology and criminology to twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Höcker demonstrates how modern authors consciously engaged casuistic forms of writing to arrive at new understandings of literary discourse that correspond to major historical transformations in the function of fiction. He argues for the centrality of literature to changes in the conceptions of psychological knowledge production around 1800; legal responsibility and institutionalized forms of decision-making throughout the nineteenth century; and literature's own realist demands in the early twentieth century.

Arne Höcker is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Höcker's study is exemplary in how it combines reflections on the history of literary fiction with considerations of formal questions of literary representation, narration, and genre, while also offering nuanced readings of some of the most prominent texts of the German literary canon.

This is an important book on a number of counts. The book is well-written, well-argued, and well-researched—in short, a smart, well-executed monograph. [T]his is an extremely valuable contribution to our field and will be a useful resource.

Judith Ryan, Harvard University, author of The Cambridge Introduction to German Poetry:

The Case of Literature lucidly unfolds a history of the literary case study in German literature from Goethe to the modernists Döblin and Musil, with a concluding postscript on Kafka. This well written book uses original analyses of important texts to persuasively make the case for a three-phase contribution of German narrative to our understanding of the literary case study as a genre.

Fritz Breithaupt, Indiana University, author of The Dark Sides of Empathy:

A brilliant book on the important genre of the literary case study. Arne Höcker shows how administrative decision-making, at the very moment in the 19th century when it seems to function flawlessly, gives birth to its uncanny other, the individual case study.