Penumbra
-
Cora Stam
Abstract
In 1996, John Neubauer published the article “Clair-Obscur, An Imagined Dialogue between Diderot and Goethe”. In the first part of his paper he organized the dialogue – about the issue of the theory of colours – between the two heavyweights; in the second part Neubauer hazarded a hypothesis why Goethe would have left the original project of his translation of Diderot's Essais sur la peinture incomplete. It is common knowledge that Goethe disagreed with Newton about the issue of chromatics and that he considered Diderot as a follower – like most of the French – of Newton and his ideas. In this essay I will focus on the twilight zone of the polemic character of the “Clair-Obscur”-dialogue. Unfortunately, like Neubauer, I have not been able to find any translations, so the passages written by Diderot are in French, and Goethe's commentary is in German. I would like to start with a squib from the article “Clair-Obscur”.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Portrait of an Interdisciplinary Life. John Neubauer zum 70. Geburtstag
- Introduction
- Thought-Images: A Brief History of Time
- The Return of the Dinosaurs: About Scientific Imagination and its Affects
- Borders and Monuments: Goethe's Reconstruction of the World as Knowledge
- History, Theory and Abraham Gottlob Werner
- Mynheer Peeperkorn's Fever
- Introduction
- History, Empire, Opera
- Music Albums: A Tiny Gesamtkunstwerk?
- Listening to Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate. A Dadaistic-Romantic transposition d'arts?
- Introduction
- Reading Melling's Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople. Topography and Control
- Penumbra
- Bruno Freddi's Vissuto
- From Stony Facts to Paper Flowers
- Picturing It. The Issue of Visuality in the Classical Theory of Metaphor
- Introduction
- The Practical Use of Historiography: from Haffner to Herodotus
- The Gap between Hannah Arendt and Franz Kafka
- Literature and Art in History
- Cultural Memory, Cultural History and Cultural Canons in the Third Millennium
- Cross-border Histories
- Introduction
- The Intolerable
- History, Theory and the Middle Voice
- Sacred Memory or Relics: Should Holocaust Documents Be Altered?
- Blasting the Historical Continuum: Stories of my Grandmother
- Der Erlkönig in Sarajevo: Did the monument forecast the catastrophe?
- Introduction
- Hans Mayer – Ansichten eines komparatistischen Außenseiters
- Mastering Adolescence in the Age of Cultural Studies
- Bamboozled by Literature
- Arguments for a Cross-Cultural Literary History. Theoretical and Practical Implications
- Comparative Literary History, Theory and Practice: John Neubauer's Contribution
- “Rich Seeds We Must Sow … But If Only a Few Will Take”
- John Neubauer's Cultural Geographies
- The Marathon Man
- Embracing the Horizon
- Rezensionen
Articles in the same Issue
- Portrait of an Interdisciplinary Life. John Neubauer zum 70. Geburtstag
- Introduction
- Thought-Images: A Brief History of Time
- The Return of the Dinosaurs: About Scientific Imagination and its Affects
- Borders and Monuments: Goethe's Reconstruction of the World as Knowledge
- History, Theory and Abraham Gottlob Werner
- Mynheer Peeperkorn's Fever
- Introduction
- History, Empire, Opera
- Music Albums: A Tiny Gesamtkunstwerk?
- Listening to Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate. A Dadaistic-Romantic transposition d'arts?
- Introduction
- Reading Melling's Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople. Topography and Control
- Penumbra
- Bruno Freddi's Vissuto
- From Stony Facts to Paper Flowers
- Picturing It. The Issue of Visuality in the Classical Theory of Metaphor
- Introduction
- The Practical Use of Historiography: from Haffner to Herodotus
- The Gap between Hannah Arendt and Franz Kafka
- Literature and Art in History
- Cultural Memory, Cultural History and Cultural Canons in the Third Millennium
- Cross-border Histories
- Introduction
- The Intolerable
- History, Theory and the Middle Voice
- Sacred Memory or Relics: Should Holocaust Documents Be Altered?
- Blasting the Historical Continuum: Stories of my Grandmother
- Der Erlkönig in Sarajevo: Did the monument forecast the catastrophe?
- Introduction
- Hans Mayer – Ansichten eines komparatistischen Außenseiters
- Mastering Adolescence in the Age of Cultural Studies
- Bamboozled by Literature
- Arguments for a Cross-Cultural Literary History. Theoretical and Practical Implications
- Comparative Literary History, Theory and Practice: John Neubauer's Contribution
- “Rich Seeds We Must Sow … But If Only a Few Will Take”
- John Neubauer's Cultural Geographies
- The Marathon Man
- Embracing the Horizon
- Rezensionen
