Goethe's Colors: Revolutionary Optics and the Anthropocene
Abstract:For Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832), a study of colors expresses the morphological and metamorphic processes of the active natural world, energized by the sunlight, that grow, live, and crystallize into ever new forms. Rather than focusing on static objects, Goethe saw the natural—and social—world as an expression of ongoing processes. Colors are, above all, actively developing components of a world in fux, not fxed entities. Newton, he wrote, was wrong in that he studied light as if it were an isolated feature and not an interactive part of the world. Newton's breakdown of white light into the spectrum of colors is accurate, of course; what Goethe recognized, in contrast, is the more complex and muddied realm of perception and relations between and among things and observers, studied in quantum mechanics and the new materialisms. In other words, these felds and Goethe postulate that our physical world and human existence are part of manifold engagements between energy, matter, living things, and mental perception. We are never truly "outside" of the system that we study, though most of empirical science assumes that we are or could be or at least should strive to be when undertaking objective studies. With this vision, Goethe offers what I call a proto-"ecological theory of colors" at the beginning of the newly defned geological era of the Anthropocene when human activities have left traces on environmental systems across the entire Earth.
Visual arts: a multimodal language for Indigenous education
Abstract Visual arts and other modes and media of communication are vital to Indigenous People, yet multimodal forms of representation, such as those prioritised in the arts, are often poorly understood and excluded from Indigenous education. This article describes cross-cultural, participatory community research enacted with an Indigenous school in Australia. Indigenous elementary students were taught by Indigenous community leaders to engage in visual arts through paintings and other forms of artistic representation (e.g. dances, rap video). These artistic expressions were coherent with Indigenous ways of learning and communicating. The multidimensionality of Indigenous students’ paintings was analysed, and the significance explained in relation to the language of transgenerational Indigenous Lore. The results demonstrate how Indigenous visual arts enabled powerful representations of transgenerational knowledge and understandings. The findings also provide generative illustrations of a culturally informed and responsive multimodal literacy pedagogy, highlighting the need to respect the multimodal dimensions of representation that have cultural meanings for Indigenous identity and education practices. The article challenges Western, privileged forms of literacy, while highlighting the need to respect visual arts as language in the English curriculum for equitable and culturally responsive education for Indigenous students.
Browning's Lyric Intentions
No poet was ever more fascinated by intentions than Browning, or more willing to insist upon their significance. In Sordello (1840), in his prose essays on Chatterton (1842) and Shelley (1852),' and elsewhere, Browning asserts that what a poet writes is less than what he means; that realization betrays impulse; that form even at its best expresses purpose inadequately.2 Criticism written in recent decades, in its just recoil from superficial assessments of poetic intentionality like those issued by the Browning Societies, has been ill at ease with those who would champion intentions. Criticism has not been slow to draw from Browning's assertions the conclusion that he so prized the poem-as-intention that he disdained the poem-as-artifact; nor has it been slow to disdain him in