Interdisciplinary scholarship is reframing a discourse about the “unexpected body” (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson) from a range of perspectives, including intersectional feminism, posthumanism, disability studies, ecocriticism, and critical race theory. Although scholarship about the body frequently reflects presentist perspectives, eighteenth-century aesthetics, with anthropocentric roots in Enlightenment thought, likewise offer fertile material for analysis. The Forum has organized two panels on eighteenth-century human and non-human bodies in German-speaking Europe, with eight papers (total) that approach the non-normative body from innovative perspectives.

The first panel, “The Non-Human and The Monstrous,” opens with Luke Rylander’s “Maternal Monstrosity: Ambiguity of Embodied Viewing in Wagner’s Die Kindermörderin.” The unexpected body held particular currency in the gaze-economy of the eighteenth century, with the “monstrous birth” drawing special fascination among medical professionals and the general public alike. In addition to the empirical pressure to establish first cause and address anomalous births, there was a further discursive investment in diagnosing these bodies at the embryological level to question the origin of life. This paper examines the recoding of the monstrous birth to extend beyond physiology into social contexts of birth that make legible a paradigm shift that generates and subsequently seeks to defuse an anomaly. Leopold Wagner’s Die Kindermörderin, as Rylander demonstrates, recodes the murderous mother and the female body’s ability to gestate as suspicious and fascinating, bizarre and unexpectable.

The second paper, Melissa Sheedy’s “Abandoning Utopia: Transgressive Bodies and the Limits of the Enlightenment in Ludwig Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert (1797),” reads Tieck’s fairy-tale through the lens of feminist material ecocriticism (Alaimo and Hekman), arguing that it is alive with transgressive bodies that challenge the definitions of human and non-human and point to the limits of the Enlightenment. She focuses on Bertha, who initially performs domestic duties to the satisfaction of an old woman who governs the otherworldly realm. Bertha’s eventual abandonment of the idyll for the “real world,” a place marked by the commodification of othered bodies, corresponds to a failure in perception. Her inability to perceive agency in nature and transformed bodies are Bertha’s failures, which are tied to the unexpectedly agential bodies she encounters on her journey. Tieck’s engagement with transgressive bodies reveals the instability of a system governed by vision and progress, posing a critical moment of skepticism towards Enlightenment epistemics.

In Renata Gambino and Grazia Pulvirenti’s “Hounds, Horses and Elephants in Heinrich von Kleist’s Drama Penthesilea,” the co-presenters focus on the packs of hounds, palfreys, Persian horses, elephants, and hunting prey like the deer, big and small game, foxes, and boars in this play (1806-08). These non-human bodies act as agents in hunting scenes, functioning as “diegetic animals” (Borgards). Depicted as living creatures and as “actors,” the hounds seem to live with Amazons, co-shaping one another in a sort of cross-species community (Haraway). The bodily representation of such a habitat leads to the emerging of “unexpected bodily behaviors” like the scene of Penthesilea eating Achilles’ body with her hounds. From this perspective, hunting becomes a significant semantic field of the play. Framed by the ideological issues implied by the hunting motif in the anthropological and political discourse of Kleist’s epoch, the co-presenters analyze the function of game hunting in the play with regard to the bodily representation of humans and animals in a cross-species community, revealing new political and still unexamined issues of the play.

The final paper, “Fantasies of Mechanical Non-Conforming Bodies: Hybrid Imaginary in Action,” comments on the fairy tale and fantasy texts of the early nineteenth century experiment with transitions between magic, uncanny, mechanically produced hybridity. Dorothee Ostmeier focuses on shapeshifting and non-normative bodies, primarily in ETA Hoffmann, who radically revises marvelous processes (Todorov) and demonstrates how the fascination with extraordinary bodies becomes a technological enterprise: these bodies either entertain, or create mental illness. Hoffmann introduces technicians like Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker or Coppelius/Coppola/ Spalanzini in The Sandman who animate dolls in order to test their mechanics on others. Mechanical bodies operate as the center of these narratives: the doll Olimpia and the nutcracker. In both of these revisions of myth, dolls are animated by their mechanical engineers to test the potential of rationalist technologies to influence the human psyche. Using visual materials, Ostmeier presents religious, socio-political, and folkloric strands of mechanical romanticism that inform the entertainment function of the nutcracker. Finally, she ties in the fascination with models and machines, from orreries to mechanical animals, to depict non-normative bodies for entertainment and destruction.

The papers will lead to a discussion that will continue in the second session.

.