Natures of Color: The Literary Environments of Adalbert Stifter and Paul Scheerbart

Dunn, Sorrel

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-9k6g-p474

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Natures of Color: The Literary Environments of Adalbert Stifter and Paul Scheerbart

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This dissertation examines how nineteenth century German literature constructed and experimented with an entangled concept of “the environment” based not in (Romantic) philosophical and literary conceptions of nature, but in the theory and science of color perception. As the visual point of interaction between an observer and their surrounding world, color became a particularly generative phenomenon for imagining and experimenting with human-environment relationships. Likewise, it is particularly suited to tracking and intervening in the historical development of these conceptions of environment, because it so readily slides among scientific, literary, and cultural domains, all functioning within a complex act of perception, which the black and white of the literary text makes visible.The first chapter establishes the scientific-theoretical framework for what I call “the nature of color” through a comparative analysis of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (1810) and Jakob von Uexküll’s term Umwelt, which he coined in 1909. Uexküll was particuarly interested in Goethean color theory, and I show how he developed Goethe’s conception of color into a dynamic, fully-fledged concept of environment. Despite their different fields of study, this chapter reveals how both Goethe’s and Uexküll’s work transforms “nature” into “environment(s)” by examining the natural world as it surrounds its participant-inhabitants and as it is constructed through their observations and actions. The next two chapters examine the nature of color as it appears in the literary environments of Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868) and Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915). The combination of these authors is new and, in German studies, unexpected, but I show how both engage with the Goethean conception of color—as the visual interaction point between an observer and their surrounding world—and transform it into a paradigmatic environmental phenomenon: a visual microcosm of Uexküll’s Umwelt. Establishing Goethean color as an important model for Uexküll’s concept of environment reveals a rich genealogy of color-based environmental thought and research spanning the generations between. It is this tradition of empirical and psychological research—rather than a chain of literary inheritances—that forms the backbone of this project, and opens a common space of analysis for Stifter’s and Scheerbart’s works. The “nature of color” is thus formally grounded—in Uexküll’s reception of Goethean color—and historically rooted—in nineteenth century empirical-psychological color research. Reading Stifter’s Der Nachsommer, Bergkristall, and “Die Sonnenfinsternis” and Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio and Das graue Tuch und zehn Prozent Weiß against influential color research and psychology of their day—primarily Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) and Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), I contend that Stifter’s and Scheerbart’s literary color experiments explore and initiate processes of mutual formation—both physical and affective—between observers and their surroundings in which existence and reality are anchored not by a set of invisible (physical) laws, but by the visible, aesthetic processes of the perception and interaction of color. Ultimately, this dissertation presents an aesthetically-based understanding of human ecology that is rooted in the German tradition of color theory and that emerges through, and is visible in, the same patterns of harmony and complementarity as color itself.

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