Table Of ContentCase Studies and the Dissemination
of Knowledge
The case study has proved of enduring interest to all Western societies,
particularly in relation to questions of subjectivity and the sexed self. This
volume interrogates how case studies have been used by doctors, lawyers,
psychoanalysts, and writers to communicate their fi ndings both within the
specialist circles of their academic disciplines, and beyond, to wider pub-
lics. At the same time, it questions how case studies have been taken up by
a range of audiences to refute and dispute academic knowledge. As such,
this book engages with case studies as sites of interdisciplinary negotiation,
transnational exchange and infl uence, exploring the effects of forces such as
war, migration, and internationalization.
Case Studies and the Dissemination of Knowledge challenges the limits
of disciplinary-based research in the humanities. The cases examined serve
as a means of passage between disciplines, genres, and publics, from law to
psychoanalysis, and from auto/biography to modernist fi ction. Its chapters
scrutinize the case study in order to sharpen understanding of the genre’s
dynamic role in the construction and dissemination of knowledge within
and across disciplinary, temporal, and national boundaries. In doing so,
they position the case at the center of cultural and social understandings of
the emergence of modern subjectivities.
Joy Damousi is professor of history in the School of Historical and Philo-
sophical Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Birgit Lang is senior lecturer in German in the School of Languages and
Linguistics at the University of Melbourne.
Katie Sutton is lecturer in German and gender studies at the Australian
National University.
Routledge Studies in Cultural History
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
7 Rethinking Race, Politics, and 14 Living in the City
Poetics Urban Institutions in the Low
C. L. R. James’ Critique of Countries, 1200–2010
Modernity Leo Lucassen and Wim Willems
Brett St Louis
15 Historical Disasters in
8 Making British Culture Context
English Readers and the Scottish Science, Religion, and
Enlightenment, 1740–1830 Politics
David Allan Edited by Andrea Janku, Gerrit J.
Schenk, and Franz Mauelshagen
9 Empires and Boundaries
Rethinking Race, Class, and 16 Migration, Ethnicity, and
Gender in Colonial Settings Mental Health
Edited by Harald Fischer-Tiné, International Perspectives,
and Susanne Gehrmann 1840–2010
Edited by Angela McCarthy and
10 Tobacco in Russian History and
Catharine Coleborne
Culture
From the Seventeenth Century to
17 Politics of Memory: Making
the Present
Slavery Visible in the Public
Edited by Matthew P. Romaniello
Space
and Tricia Starks
Edited by Ana Lucia Araujo
11 History of Islam in German
18 Neutrality in Twentieth-Century
Thought
Europe
From Leibniz to Nietzsche
Intersections of Science,
Ian Almond
Culture, and Politics after the
12 Israeli-Palestinian Confl ict in the First World War
Francophone World Edited by Rebecka Lettevall, Geert
Edited by Nathalie Somsen, and Sven Widmalm
Debrauwere-Miller
19 Americans Experience
13 History of Participatory Media Russia
Politics and Publics, 1750–2000 Encountering the Enigma, 1917 to
Edited by Anders Ekström Solveig the Present
Jülich, Frans Lundgren, and Per Edited by Choi Chatterjee and
Wisselgren Beth Holmgren
20 A Social History of Disability in 29 Indigenous Networks
the Middle Ages Mobility, Connections and
Cultural Considerations of Exchange
Physical Impairment Edited by Jane Carey and Jane
Irina Metzler Lydon
21 Race, Science, and the Nation 30 Shadows of the Slave Past
Reconstructing the Ancient Past in Memory, Heritage, and Slavery
Britain, France and Germany Ana Lucia Araujo
Chris Manias
31 Expedition into Empire
22 Identity, Aesthetics, and Sound Exploratory Journeys and the
in the Fin de Siècle Making of the Modern World
Redesigning Perception Edited by Martin Thomas
Dariusz Gafi jczuk
32 Luxury and Gender in
23 Disease and Crime
European Towns,
A History of Social Pathologies
1700–1914
and the New Politics of Health
Edited by Deborah Simonton,
Edited by Robert Peckham
Marjo Kaartinen, and Anne
Montenach
24 Critical Perspectives on
Colonialism
33 Reassessing the Transnational
Writing the Empire from Below
Turn
Edited by Fiona Paisley and Kirsty
Scales of Analysis in Anarchist
Reid
and Syndicalist Studies
Edited by Constance Bantman and
25 Old World Empires
Bert Altena
Cultures of Power and Governance
in Eurasia
34 Conciliation on Colonial
Ilhan Niaz
Frontiers
Confl ict, Performance and
26 The Afterlife of Used Things
Commemoration in Australia and
Recycling in the Long Eighteenth
the Pacifi c Rim
Century
Edited by Kate Darian-Smith and
Edited by Ariane Fennetaux,
Penelope Edmonds
Amélie Junqua, and Sophie Vasset
27 Holocaust Consciousness in 35 Scotland and the Caribbean,
Contemporary Britain c. 1740–1833
Andy Pearce Atlantic Archipelagos
Michael Morris
28 The Invention of Race
Scientifi c and Popular 36 Case Studies and the
Representations Dissemination of Knowledge
Edited by Nicolas Bancel, Thomas Edited by Joy Damousi, Birgit
David, and Dominic Thomas Lang, and Katie Sutton
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Case Studies and the
Dissemination of Knowledge
Edited by Joy Damousi, Birgit Lang,
and Katie Sutton
First published 2015
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
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© 2015 Taylor & Francis
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Contents
Foreword ix
JOHN FORRESTER
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Case Studies and the Dissemination of Knowledge 1
J OY DAMOUSI, BIRGIT LANG, AND KATIE SUTTON
PART I
Case Knowledge
1 The Case of the Archive 15
WARWICK ANDERSON
2 The Case Study as Representative Anecdote 31
J OHN CASH
3 Infl uencing Public Knowledge: Erich Wulffen and the
Criminal Case of Grete Beier 49
BIRGIT LANG
4 A Case for Female Individuality: Käthe
Schirmacher—Self-Invention and Biography 66
J OHANNA GEHMACHER
PART II
Historical Cases
5 Sexological Cases and the Prehistory of Transgender
Identity Politics in Interwar Germany 85
KATIE SUTTON
viii Contents
6 The Sad Tale of Sister Barbara Ubryk: A Case
Study in Convent Captivity 104
TIMOTHY VERHOEVEN
7 The Curious Case/s of Dr. Wallace: Sexuality and the
Medical File in Postwar Australia 118
L ISA FEATHERSTONE
8 S exuality and the Public Case Study in the
United States, 1940–65 133
J OY DAMOUSI
PART III
Literary Circulations
9 Female Sex Murders and Literary Case Writing: Alfred
Döblin’s Die beiden Freundinnen und ihr Giftmord (1924) 155
ALISON LEWIS
10 The Lunatics of Love: Armand Dubarry’s Psychopathological
Novels and Their Publics 172
J ANA VERHOEVEN
11 M aking a Case for Castration: Literary Cases and
Psychoanalytic Readings 188
CHRISTIANE WELLER
12 When the Case Writer Eclipses the Case: Linda Lê’s
Case Study of Ingeborg Bachmann 203
ALEXANDRA KURMANN
Contributors 219
Index 223
Foreword
John Forrester
The three great professions of the Western tradition—law, medicine, and
theology—developed practices centered on cases, which formed the bedrock
of the later effl orescence of case-centered writing examined in this book.
In law, the case, alongside the law (statute), developed as the primary unit
of legal argument and of record, as the backbone of a legal system of writ-
ing and accounting (for example, Donoghue v. Stevenson [1932]; Brown v.
Board of Education [1954], Wyong v. Shirt [1980]). The theological case
developed entwined with the practice of confession, giving rise to the body
of rules and guidance known as casuistry—the application of general moral
principles to the particular moral conundrums and oddities of individual
action. The permutations of the medical case, through reports, case notes,
and case books, developed in the nineteenth century as one, if not the, prin-
cipal method of record keeping, internal accounting, pedagogy, and dissemi-
nation of knowledge. We might conclude that the case was the privileged
genre of the professionals, those engaged in “that kind of business which
deals primarily with men as men and is thus distinguished from a trade,
which provides for the external wants or occasions of men” (F. D. Maurice,
Lectures on the Education of the Middle Classes , 1839): the case was the
form of writing most immediately applicable to diffi culties and crises in
human relationships over which our professionals preside.
Despite these great and authoritative legal, medical, and theological tra-
ditions, novel nineteenth-century developments gave rise to the golden age
of the case from the 1850s on. We can point to a series of independent fac-
tors that promoted the rise of the case: to the growing maturity and cultural
entrenchment of the novel, linked to the rise of new audiences, new classes,
new markets, new paths through society (the Bildungsroman ); the uncom-
fortable transition by which the moral life, previously regulated by canon
law and the Church, became increasingly regulated by criminal law in the
secular domain; the development of the fi rst modern speciality of medicine,
medical psychology (alienism, psychiatry), with a prominent public face for
these struggling new experts giving witness in law courts on the mental con-
dition and standing of parties in both civil and criminal cases; the invention
of the detective story, with its fi rst golden era culminating in The Case-Book
