Johannes Wankhammer

Much of my published work examines the intertwined histories of attention and aesthetics, particularly in the eighteenth century, and increasingly in relation to environmental concerns. Within the environmental humanities, I have written on the ambivalent status of anthropomorphic descriptions of in trees Peter Wohlleben’s Das geheime Leben der Bäume (The Hidden Life of Trees), on metaphors of roots and rootedness in Western culture, on narrative experiments in Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (Man in the Holocene), and on Adorno's concept of "natural history” as the basis of ecological critique. An article on a proto-ecological strand in A. G. Baumgarten’s pioneering aesthetic theory is forthcoming.

These studies form the basis of my current book project, a critical environmental history of German aesthetics. Arguing that ecological concerns have been integral to aesthetic thought since the eighteenth century, the project pursues two lines of inquiry: it reconstructs the material conditions of aesthetic experience in shifting environmental practices (land use, landscape architecture, urbanization) and traces an undercurrent of ecological reflection within German aesthetic theory from Baumgarten to Adorno and contemporary theories of resonance. The book presents the German aesthetic tradition as a laboratory for articulating entanglements between human and extra-human worlds that have been sidelined in the mainstream of Western thought.

 

Website: https://jowa.scholar.princeton.edu/