When we think about “figures” of importance in the history of the human sciences, names like Wundt or Durkheim tend to come to mind. In this panel, however, another kind of figure claims our attention for its role in the generation and reception of human-scientific knowledge: the rhetorical, or stylistic figure—of which our play on “figure” in these two sentences is one small example. That such figures bear epistemological and ontological weight was a major tenet of the so-called rhetorical/linguistic turn in the history of science. More recently, scholars have reopened another theme of the linguistic turn, analysing the organising and explanatory functions of narrative in scientific activity (e.g. Morgan & Wise, 2017). Our panel takes the questions raised by “narrative science” as an opportunity to re-examine the work done by particular figures of style across the human sciences, and thus to explore how that work articulates with narrative forms of knowing. A focus on figures additionally prompts more explicit consideration of reader participation in producing scientific narratives and scientific meaning—whether through the ways figures invite an imaginative response (from an implied reader), or the ways (actual) reader reception in some historical/cultural context inflects scientific debates. Are explanatory narratives constructed in part from a set of stylistic figures? If so, to what extent is a given figure or its imaginative possibilities, rather than the narrative as a whole, crucial to making meaning from human-scientific phenomena? Under what conditions—historical, cultural, textual—do the implications of a particular figure destabilise narratives already circulating in scientific discourse? And is there a trade-off between the potential for a figure to be misconstrued and its capacity to open up unconventional meanings?
If these questions frame our panel on a broad scholarly level, individual papers engage with them more or less explicitly. What directly unites our contributions is a concern to unpack the functions—epistemological, ontological, rhetorical, or (just) amusing—of one particular figure in a contained discursive context. This provides us with the depth to study our chosen figure in detail, while the range of our four papers provides the breadth to draw larger conclusions. Our panel’s diversity firstly arises from our adopting a loose definition of a stylistic figure; we study metaphor, code-switching, indirect discourse, and accumulation—expressive effects that are often carved up in rhetorical or literary studies. Similarly, our case-studies range across human sciences from physiology to psychoanalysis, and from the mid-18th century to the early 20th century.
Among this diversity, two major functions emerge: firstly, the role of stylistic figures in providing linguistic access to the interior workings of human mental processes, and in “translating” those processes into the communicative realm of scientific activity; and secondly, the way figures help to constitute a domain of enquiry or set of practitioners as scientific. Thus, metaphor proved a descriptive resource for Freud, as well as a rich tool in his struggles to transfer his clinical experience into scientific theories c.a. 1914–20, as discussed by Shann. Some years earlier, it was the inner experience of emotion that Vytautas Civinskis, who had attended some of Wundt’s lectures, tried to carry across into language. In Civinskis’s case the translation was literal, as Almonaitienė and Girininkaitė show; the recourse to code-switching between multiple languages is a major stylistic feature of his reflections. Questions around constructing science link the final two papers, as Hajek and Levinson explore how stylistic figures helped, respectively, to form a Durkheimian view of sociological science, and naturalize “resuscitation” in a world that wasn’t finished with “miracles,” both in texts which also served other rhetorical/epistemic purposes. Specifically, Hajek interrogates the use of indirect discourse and resulting shifts in narratorial distance in book reviews in the early years of the Année sociologique, while Levinson closes the panel by investigating the accumulation of singular narratives about the uncertainty of signs of death, as they were translated and collected by Bruhier d’Ablaincourt and received by mid-18th-century French readers.
Papers:
Metaphor and Narrative in Freud.
Jonathan Shann, UCL, UK
Epistemological Function of Code-Switching in a Multilingual Text: The Case of the Student Vytautas Civinskis’ Multilingual Diaries.
Junona S. Almonaitienė, Department of Health Psychology, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences
Veronika Girininkaitė, Vilnius University Library & Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University, Lithuania
Indirect Discourse, Narrator Distance and Sociological Knowledge in the Early Years of the Année sociologique (1896–1900).
Kim M. Hajek, LSE, UK
Repetition of the singular and accumulation of the exceptional in Jacques-Jean Bruhier D’Ablaincourt’s (1742)Dissertation sur l’Incertitude des signes de la mort et l’abus des enterremens et Embaumens précipités.
Sharman Levinson, Université d’Angers & The American University of Paris, France