Affinity and Self-Experiment: J. W. Ritter’s Galvanic Poetics

Time: 12:00pm

Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation

Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810), German electrochemist and Romantic, subjected his body to a series of brutal self-experiments in what he thought of as a heroic quest to understand the nature of galvanism and thus of chemistry and physics, and of nature itself. His work is defined by the bizarre meeting of cutting-edge findings and alchemical explanations, of sophisticated Romantic poetic devices and baroque obfuscations. The stakes are particularly high in a work published shortly before his death, The Fragments from the Estate of a Young Physicist (1810). At once scientific and literary in nature, Fragments set into motion a poetic experiment that affects not only the selfhood of the author but ultimately also of the reader. The talk will explore these implications for a Romantic understanding of the scientific self in particular and for chemistry in general.

Carolina Malagon is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of German at Princeton University. She received her master’s degree in Berlin at the Humboldt-University and her B.A. degree from Yale. Her general area of interest is the 18th century, and she is particularly interested in the mutually constitutive relationship of literature and science around that time.