Flaws, Mistakes, Misreadings: Error and the Human Sciences in Drama around 1800.

摘要

This study provides an account of how varying discourses control meaning and truth through spectatorship and readership. Specifically, the current project tracks a relocation of error from the moral to the physical realm, a movement that begins with Lessing and continues through the turn of the nineteenth century, as error in the context of performance and interpretation of body language gains influence in dramatic, physiological, and legal texts.;Juxtaposing an analysis of Lessing's theoretical hamartia with semiotic considerations in acting theories and a reading of gestural mistakes in Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson, I suggest that Lessing's drama begins to acknowledge the body as a site of errors in communication. Secondly, the focus turns to the way in which the foundation of Anthropologie as a field relocates error between body and mind. Here, I examine physiological texts by La Mettrie, Haller, and Abel along with Schiller's medical dissertations and early dramatic works, with a specific focus on Die Rauber. This reading suggests that in Schiller, the body is a site of expression rather than representation of error. Finally, my scope turns to error at the intersection of legal and theatrical practice. Of particular interest are juridical discussions concerning the quantification of evidence, with an emphasis on gesture protocols that document each movement of a defendant's body in hope of enhancing the court's precision. These protocols indicate the limits and liabilities of a legal system that grounds itself in subjective judgment and the fallibility of verbal and gestural language. In this way, courtroom developments are intrinsically related to my close reading concerning the challenges of interpreting evidence in Kleist's Die Familie Schroffenstein.;This study makes the case that around 1800, bodily irregularities and mistakes in reading the body become essential components of tragic drive, so that fallibility of the body in essence replaces classical Greek providence. Moreover, my assessment of language and performance in multiple discourses suggests ways in which this change is in fact the central element of a much larger cultural shift, and I thus dub the period around 1800 an "Epoch of Error."