Von der Bezeugung zur narrativen Vergegenwärtigung. Fokalisierung im Reisebuch des Syrers Ḥanna Dyāb (1764)

Travelogues involve different truth claims, depending on whether their authors attempt on the one hand to convey received knowledge about entities and places, or on the other hand, present accounts of the traveler character’s own experiences. This study focuses on a travelogue from 1764 written by the Arabian Nights’ Syrian storyteller, Ḥanna Dyāb. Having written his travelogue more than 50 years after his trip to Paris, he evidently conceived of his narrative as a means to re-enact his experiences as a young traveler. To describe his particular self-staging in this autodiegetic narration “before fiction” (Paige 2011), I argue that an understanding of focalization as a graded visual mediation between the character’s inner life and the reader is needed. This approach helps one grasp how, with reference to Dyāb’s travelogue, truth is not something the traveler witnesses, but rather something the reader is invited to realize. I conclude that, with this shift from witnessing to visualization (Vergegenwärtigung), Dyāb’s travelogue fulfills a core function of literature.

William Harvey revisited

William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood is often described as a product of the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. Modern research has, however, shown thatHarvey followed the Aristotelian research tradition and thus tried to reveal the purpose of the organs through examination of various animals. His publication of 1628 has to be read as an argument of natural philosophy, or, more precisely, as a series of linked observations, experiments and philosophical reasonings from which the existence of circulation has to be deduced as a logical consequence. Harvey did not consider experiments as superior to philosophical reasoning nor intended he to create a new system of medicine. He believed in the vitality of the heart and the blood and rejected Francis Bacon's empirism and the mechanistic rationalism of Descartes. Harvey's contribution and originality lied less in his single observations and experiments but in the manner how he linked them with critical reasoning and how he accepted, presented and defended the ensuing radical findings.