Natural history and the history of the self: Autobiography and science in Rousseau and Goethe

This dissertation examines the relationship between the outwardly-directed study of nature and the inwardly-directed act of autobiographical writing in Rousseau and Goethe. What does the meticulous investigation of the natural world have to do with the exploration of the self? While literary critics and historians of science have generally considered the autobiographical and the scientific separately, this project views the two fields in their productive interrelation, thus restoring them to the shared cultural environment in which they existed. Interpreting both scientific and literary texts, I argue that autobiography and natural history are not simply related, but mutually constitutive projects that define each other as essentially interdisciplinary. Self-knowledge requires a knowledge of the natural world, while a true knowledge of the natural world demands an awareness of the role the subject plays in even the most empirical acts of perception.;This reciprocal relation is traced in two distinct, but interrelated ways. First, the scientific writings of Rousseau and Goethe are shown to be attempts, however different in nature and form, to articulate a language capable of giving proper expression to the relation between subjective and objective experience, the order of things and the ordering mind, which for them structures any meaningful observation of the natural world. Secondly, a reading of Rousseau's Confessions and Reveries and Goethe's Poetry and Truth shows how each relates an understanding of the natural world to a historical and dynamic conception of human nature that would transform literary history. Finally, in addition to their role in forming literary history, this dissertation argues that autobiography and natural history are themselves constituted at the border between science and literary representation and thus challenge the incipient division of fields of inquiry that Rousseau and Goethe sought to keep whole.