Case of literature : forensic narratives from Goethe to Kafka, The

This text offers a radical reassessment of the modern European literary canon. The book's reinterpretations of Goethe, Schiller, Buchner, Doblin, Musil, and Kafka show how literary and scientific narratives have determined each other over the past three centuries, and it 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. Arne Höcker 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.