Markus Asper - Böcker

Scientific and technological texts have not played a significant role in modern literary criticism. This applies to Classics, too, despite the fact that a large part of the field’s extant texts deal with questions of medicine, mathematics, and natural philosophy. Focusing mostly on medical and mathematical texts, this collection aims at approaching ancient Greek science and its texts from the cross-disciplinary perspective of authorship. Among the questions addressed are: What is a scientific author? In what respect does scientific writing differ from ‘literary’ writing? How does the author present himself as an authoritative figure through his text? What strategies of trust do these authors employ? These and related questions cannot be discussed within the typical boundaries of modern academic disciplines, thus most of the sixteen authors, many of them leading experts in the fields of ancient science, bring a comparative perspective to their subjects. As a result, the collection not only offers a new approach to this vast area of ancient literature, thus effectively discovering new possibilities for literary criticism, it also reflects on our current forms of scientific and scholarly written communication.

Who is afraid of case literature? In an influential article ("Thinking in Cases", 1996), John Forrester made a case for studying case literature more seriously, exemplifying his points, mostly, with casuistic traditions of law. Unlike in modern literatures, case collections make up a significant portion of ancient literary traditions, such as Mesopotamian, Greek, and Chinese, mostly in medical and forensic contexts. The genre of cases, however, has usually not been studied in its own right by modern scholars. Due to its pervasiveness, case literature lends itself to comparative studies to which this volume intends to make a contribution. While cases often present truly fascinating epistemic puzzles, in addition they offer aesthetically pleasing reading experiences, due to their narrative character. Therefore, the case, understood as a knowledge-transmitting narrative about particulars, allows for both epistemic and aesthetic approaches. This volume presents seven substantial studies of cases and case literature: Topics touched upon are ancient Greek medical, forensic, philosophical and mathematical cases, medical cases from imperial China, and 20th-century American medical case writing. The collection hopes to offer a pilot of what to do with and how to think about cases.