“The Food of Light”: Melville’s Critique of Transcendental Optics in Moby-Dick
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This paper explores the tension between Emerson’s Nature and Melville’s Moby-Dick in terms of their conflicting stances toward vital issues in nineteenth-century optics: transparency versus opacity and transcendental rationality versus corporeal contingency. For this, I examine how Crary rediscovers the significance of Goethe as the one who founded not only physiological optics against Newton’s physical optics but also the physiological model of subjective vision against Kant’s idealistic model of subjective vision. Using it as theoretical lens, I demonstrate how the two writers’ disparate attitudes towards Goethe in Melville’s 1851 letter and Emerson’s 1840 Dial essay are related with Emerson’s transparent eyeball in Nature and Melville’s color and light/darkness symbolism and imagery in Moby-Dick. Goethe’s earlier attempt to support, but eventual repudiation of, Kant’s esteem for transparency and transcendence in the subject-as-observer’s vision and epistemology—alongside Goethe’s later anti-Romantic position by turning away from his earlier seemingly Romantic characteristics in his literature—are crucial for understanding Emerson’s and Melville’s complex positions on Goethe. In theorizing his notion of the transparent eyeball, Emerson draws on, among several possible sources of inspiration, Kant’s transcendental and idealistic subjective vision and Newton’s theory of transparent bodies and light transmission and reflection. In contrast, although Melville in the 1851 letter criticizes Goethe’s romantic concept of “all feeling,” Melville’s emphasis on ambiguity, opacity and corporeality in color and light imagery in Moby-Dick is reminiscent of Goethe’s color theory, especially the effects of the turbid media for the observer’s visual perception as a necessary condition for the appearance of colors as physiological phenomena. I read Melville’s Goethean color and light imagery as his critique of Emerson’s pro-Newtonian and pro-Kantian transcendental optics.
Abstract
This paper explores the tension between Emerson’s Nature and Melville’s Moby-Dick in terms of their conflicting stances toward vital issues in nineteenth-century optics: transparency versus opacity and transcendental rationality versus corporeal contingency. For this, I examine how Crary rediscovers the significance of Goethe as the one who founded not only physiological optics against Newton’s physical optics but also the physiological model of subjective vision against Kant’s idealistic model of subjective vision. Using it as theoretical lens, I demonstrate how the two writers’ disparate attitudes towards Goethe in Melville’s 1851 letter and Emerson’s 1840 Dial essay are related with Emerson’s transparent eyeball in Nature and Melville’s color and light/darkness symbolism and imagery in Moby-Dick. Goethe’s earlier attempt to support, but eventual repudiation of, Kant’s esteem for transparency and transcendence in the subject-as-observer’s vision and epistemology—alongside Goethe’s later anti-Romantic position by turning away from his earlier seemingly Romantic characteristics in his literature—are crucial for understanding Emerson’s and Melville’s complex positions on Goethe. In theorizing his notion of the transparent eyeball, Emerson draws on, among several possible sources of inspiration, Kant’s transcendental and idealistic subjective vision and Newton’s theory of transparent bodies and light transmission and reflection. In contrast, although Melville in the 1851 letter criticizes Goethe’s romantic concept of “all feeling,” Melville’s emphasis on ambiguity, opacity and corporeality in color and light imagery in Moby-Dick is reminiscent of Goethe’s color theory, especially the effects of the turbid media for the observer’s visual perception as a necessary condition for the appearance of colors as physiological phenomena. I read Melville’s Goethean color and light imagery as his critique of Emerson’s pro-Newtonian and pro-Kantian transcendental optics.
참고문헌 (46)
- Baer, Madeline, "Water, Place, and Equity", pp.195~224 (2008), MIT P,
- Bod, Rens, "Introduction: The Humanities and the Sciences", ISIS: A Journal of the History of Science Society, 106(2), pp.337~340 (2015)
- Crary, Jonathan, "Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century" (1990), MIT P
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller Selected Works", pp.58~74 (2003), Houghton Mifflin
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "Essays: Second Series. Vol. 3 of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson", pp.25~50 (1983), Belknap P of Harvard UP
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2: 1836-1838", pp.22~41 (1964), Harvard UP
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson 16 vols" (1982), Harvard UP
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller Selected Works: Essays, Poems, and Dispatches with Introduction", pp.23~57 (2003), Houghton Mifflin
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "Representative Men: Seven Lectures" (1850), Phillips, Sampson and Company
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1: 1843-1854" (2001), U of Georgia P
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "Thoughts on Modern Literature", The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion, 1(2), pp.137~158 (1840)
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller Selected Works: Essays, Poems, and Dispatches with Introduction", pp.139~154 (2003), Houghton Mifflin
- Finholt, Richard, "American Visionary Fiction: Mad Metaphysics As Salvation Psychology" (1978), Kennikat
- Frothingham, Octavius Brooks, "Transcendentalism in New England: A History" (1876), G. P. Putman’s Sons
- Giesenkirchen, Michaela, "‘Still Half Blending with the Blue of the Sea’:Goethe’s Theory of Colors in Moby-Dick", Leviathan, 7(1), pp.3~18 (2005)
- "Goethe and Romanticism" (2009)[URL]
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, "Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret. Vol. 2", pp.65~ (1850), Smith, Elder & Co.
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, "Theory of Colours" (1840), John Murray, Albemarle Street
- Goulet, Andrea, "Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction" (2006), U of Pennsylvania P,
- Hubbard, Ruth, "The Gender and Science Reader", pp.49~51 (2001), Routledge
- Kant, Immanuel, "Critique of Pure Reason" (1855), Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden
- Krauss, Rosalind E., "Grids", October, 9, pp.50~64 (1979)
- Maloney, Ian S., "Melville’s Monumental Imagination", pp.87~122 (2006), Routledge
- Marovitz, Sanford E., "Melville’s Problematic ‘Being", ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 28(1), pp.11~23 (1982)
- McIntosh, James, "Melville’s Use and Abuse of Goethe: The Weaver-Gods in Faust and Moby-Dick", Amerikastudien American Studies, 25, pp.158~173 (1980)
- Melville, Herman, "Vol. 14 of The Writings of Herman Melville" (1993), Northwestern UP and The Newberry Library
- Melville, Herman, "Vol. 15 of The Writings of Herman Melville" (1989), Northwestern UP and The Newberry Library
- Melville, Herman, "Moby-Dick; Or, the Whale" (1952), Hendricks House
- Melville, Herman, "Moby-Dick, or the Whale" (1992), Penguin
- Naseem, Mohammad, "International Environmental Law" (2018), Wolters Kluwer Law & Business
- Newton, Isaac, "Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light", Royal Society
- Otis, Laura, "Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century:An Anthology", pp.xvii~xvii-xxvi (2002), Oxford UP
- Park, Joon Hyung, "From Transcendental Subjective Vision to Political Idealism:Panoramas in Antebellum American Literature", PhD, pp.2012
- Ra’ad, Basem L., "A Companion to Herman Melville", pp.129~145 (2006), Blackwell
- Rowe, John Carlos, "Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller Selected Works: Essays, Poems, and Dispatches with Introduction", pp.1~17 (2003), Houghton Mifflin
- Rusk, Ralph L., "The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol.1" (1939), Columbia UP
- Scholnick, Robert J., "American Literature and Science", pp.1~17 (2015), UP of Kentucky
- Sepper, Dennis L., "Goethe and the Poetics of Science", Janus Head, 8(1), pp.207~227 (2005)
- Smith, N. Horton, "The Anti-Romanticism of Goethe", Renaissance and Modern Studies, 2(1), pp.127~152 (1958)
- Sterling, Laurie A., "Bloom’s How to Write About Herman Melville" (2009), Bloom’s Literary Criticism
- Tamarkin, Elisa, "The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville", pp.169~186 (2014), Cambridge UP
- Thwaites, Sarah, "‘Mirror with a memory’: Theories of Light and Preternatural Negatives in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick", European Journal of American Culture, 32(3), pp.121~136 (2013)
- Van Cromphout, Gustaaf, "Emerson’s Modernity and the Example of Goethe" (1990), U of Missouri P
- Wayne, Tiffany K., "Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism" (2006), Facts On File
- Yasuda, Anita, "Explore Light and Optics!" (2016), Nomad Press
- Yumibe, Joshua, "Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism" (2012), Rutgers UP