Keywords: Romanticism - Worlds - Ecological Aesthetics - Media
Affiliation: University of Chicago
In my research, I draw on the history of science, aesthetics, and philosophy to understand how worlds are constructed in various medial forms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My current book project, Romantic Media Cosmology, reconstructs the media-theoretical basis for Romantic projects of speculative worldmaking, focusing on the works of the poet-scientist Novalis and the artist Philipp Otto Runge. For both Novalis and Runge, artistic media constitute independent aesthetic worlds that allow for the blending of typically separate cosmic systems and scientific frameworks: in the world of the artwork or novel, humans exist in supernatural symbiotic configurations with plants, stars, stones, and clouds. My project develops the larger aesthetic and epistemological stakes of these experiments in distinction to Enlightenment aesthetics and science and puts Romanticism into dialogue with current theories in the Environmental Humanities (elemental media theory, planetarity).