IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB001553518

A Natural History of Disturbance: Time and the Solar Eclipse (2015)

Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology
Volume: 23.2
Issue: 2
Pages: 215-233
Publication date: 2015
Language: English

DOI: 10.1353/con.2015.0016

Publication Date: 2015
Edition Details: Part of a Series: Keeping Time

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Drawing on accounts of two total solar eclipses from 1842 and 1851, this essay reads the visual phenomena associated with them---the effects of light and darkness---in terms of narrated time. Whereas the first part of the essay investigates the time of the eclipse as it is integrated into a framework of prediction and anticipation, the second part is more concerned with how the experience of the eclipse's duration is recorded. The final section then considers the problem of the eclipse's darkness as a signifier that refuses comparison to prior experiences of time. Even though the eclipse presents an epistemological problem of how to integrate the newness of rare phenomena into familiar frameworks, it also creates an aesthetic one: namely, how to put sensory impressions into language. The essay shows how the darkness of an eclipse is linked to an experience of time defined by discontinuity, raising the question what aesthetic principles can account for or respond to such an experience. To that end, the essay will conclude by examining a peculiar proposal made by Adalbert Stifter, for whom the sense-driven aesthetics of the eclipse is also, ultimately, a problem of artistic media.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB001553518

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article T. V. Venkateswaran; (2021)
Ragoonatha Charry and the observations of the total solar eclipse of 1868 from Vanpurthy (Wanparthy), India (/p/isis/citation/CBB102068527/)

Article Lars Gislén; C. J. Eade; (2019)
The calendars of Southeast Asia. 5: Eclipse calculations, and the longitudes of the Sun, Moon and planets in Burmese and Thai astronomy (/p/isis/citation/CBB018190434/)

Article M. N. Vahia; Ganesh Halkare; Purushottam Dahedar; (2016)
Astronomy of the Korku Tribe of India (/p/isis/citation/CBB937381029/)

Article Li, Yong; (2007)
Research on 34 Ancient Chinese Timing Records of Lunar Occultations of the Planets (/p/isis/citation/CBB000933492/)

Book Milbrath, Susan; (2013)
Heaven and Earth in Ancient Mexico: Astronomy and Seasonal Cycles in the Codex Borgia (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201321/)

Article Koji Murata; Hisashi Hayakawa; Mitsuru Sôma; (2023)
A critical assessment of questionable solar eclipse memories in the Byzantine Empire from the fourth to sixth centuries CE (/p/isis/citation/CBB039908405/)

Article Gabriele Vanin; (2023)
The Dating of Dante’s Voyage in the Divine Comedy (/p/isis/citation/CBB275667449/)

Article Farnsworth, Jane Elizabeth; (2014)
“I Am Ripe for Man”: Gendered Time in Thomas Heywood's An Emblematicall Dialogue (1637) (/p/isis/citation/CBB001550491/)

Article R. Venkesteswara Pai; (2019)
Rationale for Śrīrguṇamitrādivākyas as described in the Laghuprakāśikā (/p/isis/citation/CBB546484769/)

Article Holland, Jocelyn; Kittler, Wolf; (2015)
Introduction: Keeping Time (/p/isis/citation/CBB001553513/)

Book Baker, Gregory L.; (2011)
Seven Tales of the Pendulum (/p/isis/citation/CBB001022738/)

Article Melissa Bailes; (2016)
Literary Plagiarism and Scientific Originality in the "Trans-Atlantic Wilderness" of Goldsmith, Aikin, and Barbauld (/p/isis/citation/CBB069069881/)

Book Melissa Bailes; (2017)
Questioning Nature: British Women's Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750-1830 (/p/isis/citation/CBB476661069/)

Article Melissa Bailes; (2018)
Cultivated for Consumption: Botany, Colonial Cannibalism, and National/Natural History in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (/p/isis/citation/CBB800185902/)

Article Hoare, Philip; (2013)
Cetology: How Science Inspired Moby-Dick (/p/isis/citation/CBB001320419/)

Article Buckland, Adelene; (2008)
Thomas Hardy, Provincial Geology and the Material Imagination (/p/isis/citation/CBB001022463/)

Chapter Maria Enrica D'Agostini; (2003)
J.W. Goethe, Alexander e Wihelm von Humboldt in un foglio di laboratorio (/p/isis/citation/CBB490594438/)

Book Costlow, Jane T; (2013)
Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century Forest (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420376/)

Book Richard Fallon; (2021)
Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard' Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon (/p/isis/citation/CBB569188287/)

Article Seán Hewitt; Anna Pilz; (2021)
Ecologies of the Atlantic Archipelago (/p/isis/citation/CBB507543313/)