Pfannkuchen, Antje (Author)
Fleming, Paul
Levin, Thomas Y.
Ulfers, Friedrich
New York University
Fleming, Paul
Levin, Thomas Y.
Siegel, Elke
Ulfers, Friedrich
Ronell, Avital
Siegel, Elke
Publication date: 2010
Language: English
Edition Details: Advisor: Ronell, Avital; Committee Members: Fleming, Paul, Levin, Thomas Y., Siegel, Elke, Ulfers, Friedrich.
Physical Details: 232 pp.
This dissertation sheds new light on Early German Romanticism while at the same time exploring a fresh look at the invention of photography. It has been called a mystery why the photographic process was only invented around 1839 since the technical prerequisites (camera obscura and awareness that silver salts darken under influence of light) were in place at least one century earlier. Why did no one try to put the two together sooner? And, after 1800, why were many experimenters working independently towards the same goal: to produce an inscription of light on a sensitive surface? The answer I suggest is that photography needs to be taken seriously as a product of Romanticism. And Romanticism, as I show in its Jena incarnation that makes this most obvious, was an experimental laboratory in which the sciences interacted with poetry and literature to produce the notion of a self-writing, self-expressive nature that then could inscribe itself back into the sciences. At the historical beginning of this investigation was the German scholar G. Chr. Lichtenberg who found in the 1770s dust-figures on his "Electrophore," a state-of-the-art instrument for electrical experiments. These "Lichtenberg figures," as they soon became known, were the first visual representations of electricity, as well as the first scientific illustrations that "printed" themselves automatically. The circumstance that something inherently invisible and ephemeral like electricity suddenly left a lasting trace intrigued the scientist Lichtenberg as it enabled him to better study his object. When his colleague, the acoustician E. F. F. Chladni transposed this process of self-inscription into the realm of sound, Romantic writers, especially those that were scientists themselves like J. W. Ritter and Novalis, embraced these figures as records of `nature writing herself.' This "Chiffernschrift," or secret written language, was seen as a key to the understanding of nature, a natural hieroglyph. As Romantic ideas spread throughout Europe, the concept of nature writing herself, in the absence of human mediation, electrified writers and scientists alike and made it conceivable to imagine `light writing itself,' - in other words, photography.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 72/01, Jul 2011. Proquest Document ID: 815424240. “Sheds new light on Early German Romanticism while at the same time exploring a fresh look at the invention of photography.”
Similar Citations
Book
Holland, Jocelyn;
(2009)
German Romanticism and Science: The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001221163/)
Chapter
Woyke, Andreas;
(2009)
Johann Wilhelm Ritter: Zwischen romantischer Naturphilosophie und exakter Naturwissenschaft
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001023710/)
Article
Fehige, Yiftach;
Stuart, Michael T.;
(2014)
On the Origins of the Philosophy of Thought Experiments: The Forerun
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001421038/)
Thesis
Kassenbrock, Brian W.;
(2009)
Novalis and the Two Cultures: The Chiasmic Discourse of Mathematics, Philosophy and Poetics
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001562853/)
Book
Ritter, Johann Wilhelm;
Holland, Jocelyn;
(2010)
Key Texts of Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776--1810) on the Science and Art of Nature
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001020710/)
Chapter
Maierhofer, Waltraud;
(2012)
Goethe and Forestry
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001421369/)
Article
Martín, Dolores;
Menéndez, Roberta;
(2007)
La objetividad en el Romanticismo: El Empirismo Imaginativo en J. H. Lambert y en J. W. Ritter
(/p/isis/citation/CBB000930380/)
Chapter
Henderson, Fergus;
(1998)
Novalis, Ritter and “experiment”: A tradition of “active empiricism”
(/p/isis/citation/CBB000076952/)
Book
Breidbach, Olaf;
Klinger, Kerrin;
Müller, Matthias;
(2013)
Camera Obscura: Die Dunkelkammer in Ihrer Historischen Entwicklung
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001451305/)
Book
Kelley, Theresa M.;
(2012)
Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001321257/)
Thesis
Carolina Isabel Malagon;
(2019)
Phlogisticated Relations: Lichtenberg and Ritter's Readings of Chemistry
(/p/isis/citation/CBB168978415/)
Thesis
Carlson, Charles Royal;
(2012)
Some Philosophical Origins of an Ecological Sensibility
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001567408/)
Article
Hajo Greif;
(2015)
The Darwinian tension: Romantic science and the causal laws of nature
(/p/isis/citation/CBB515135796/)
Thesis
Higgins, John Robert;
(2011)
Fossil Poetry, the Birth of Geology, and the Romantic Imagination, 1790--1860
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001567320/)
Article
Coleman, Frank M.;
(2010)
Classical Liberalism and American Landscape Representation: The Imperial Self in Nature
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001031178/)
Article
Antje Pfannkuchen;
(2016)
A Matter of Visibility—G. Chr. Lichtenberg's Art and Science of Observation
(/p/isis/citation/CBB217772192/)
Article
Tevebring, Frederika;
(2012)
Unveiling the Goddess. Artemis of Ephesus as a Symbol of Nature at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001320378/)
Thesis
Joseph Fletcher;
(2016)
Quid's Pantheism: William Blake as Natural Philosopher
(/p/isis/citation/CBB265152879/)
Book
Dean, Dennis R.;
(2007)
Romantic Landscapes: Geology and Its Cultural Influence in Britain, 1765--1835
(/p/isis/citation/CBB000774364/)
Article
Stefani Engelstein;
(2020)
Sexual Division and the New Mythology: Goethe and Schelling
(/p/isis/citation/CBB107142269/)
Be the first to comment!