Mountains, Glaciers, and Climate

In this chapter of her virtual exhibition, “Human-Nature Relations in German Literature,” Sabine Wilke examines mountains and glacial environments in German-language literary descriptions. Whereas the German Romantic poets still highlighted mountainous nature as deeply ambiguous, Goethe’s Faust tried to understand mountainous nature in its materiality through scientific studies. Modernism focuses on the more often destructive results of human-nature entanglements. For the German-language version of this exhibition, click here.

Human-Nature Relations in German Literature: A Curated Stroll through a History of Entanglement

This virtual exhibition features, in English translation, short excerpts from German-language literary texts that address human-nature entanglements. The aim is to show how literature can contribute to understanding and problematizing the relation between humans and nonhuman nature. What aspects of human-nature relations are addressed, at what point in literary history, and how are they shaped poetically? This virtual exhibition is also available in German here.

Sabine Wilke

About the author

Wilke, Sabine

University of Washington, USA

Sabine Wilke is Professor of German at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching interests include modern German literature and culture, intellectual history and theory, and cultural and visual studies. She has written books and articles on body constructions in modern German literature and culture, German unification, the history of German film and theater, contemporary German authors and filmmakers. Most recently, Wilke was involved in a larger project about German colonialism and postcoloniality and the question of comparative colonialisms, especially how Germany related differently to Africa and the South Pacific. With assistance from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Wilke is directing a transatlantic research network on the environmental humanities and is working on a new project on environmental criticism, in particular the overlapping concerns of postcolonialism and ecocriticism.

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Quellen und Weiterführende Literatur

Source literature and further reading for Sabine Wilke’s German-language virtual exhibition “Mensch und Natur in der deutschen Literatur (Human-Nature Relations in German Literature)”. For the English-language version of this exhibition, click here.

Mensch und Natur in der deutschen Literatur: Ein kuratierter Spaziergang durch eine Geschichte der Verwicklungen

In dieser virtuellen Ausstellung werden kurze Auszüge deutschsprachiger Literatur vorgestellt, die die Verstrickung von Mensch und Natur adressieren. Ziel der Ausstellung ist es, zu zeigen, inwiefern Literatur einen wichtigen Beitrag zum Verständnis und Problematisieren der Beziehung zwischen Mensch und nicht-menschlicher Natur leisten kann. Welche Aspekte dieser Beziehung werden angesprochen, zu welchem Zeitpunkt in der Literaturgeschichte und wie werden diese lyrisch gestaltet? Diese virtuelle Austellung ist hier in englischer Sprache zu finden.

Sabine Wilke

About the author

Wilke, Sabine

University of Washington, USA

Sabine Wilke is Professor of German at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching interests include modern German literature and culture, intellectual history and theory, and cultural and visual studies. She has written books and articles on body constructions in modern German literature and culture, German unification, the history of German film and theater, contemporary German authors and filmmakers. Most recently, Wilke was involved in a larger project about German colonialism and postcoloniality and the question of comparative colonialisms, especially how Germany related differently to Africa and the South Pacific. With assistance from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Wilke is directing a transatlantic research network on the environmental humanities and is working on a new project on environmental criticism, in particular the overlapping concerns of postcolonialism and ecocriticism.

Browse the exhibition

Berge, Gletscher und Klima

In this chapter of the German-language version of her virtual exhibition, “Mensch und Natur in der deutschen Literatur (Human-Nature Relations in German Literature),” Sabine Wilke examines mountains and glacial environments in German-language literary descriptions. Whereas the German Romantic poets still highlighted mountainous nature as deeply ambiguous, Goethe’s Faust tried to understand mountainous nature in its materiality through scientific studies. Modernism focuses on the more often destructive results of human-nature entanglements. For the English-language version of this exhibition, click here.

Mensch und Natur in der deutschen Literatur: Ein kuratierter Spaziergang durch eine Geschichte der Verwicklungen

In dieser virtuellen Ausstellung werden kurze Auszüge deutschsprachiger Literatur vorgestellt, die die Verstrickung von Mensch und Natur adressieren. Ziel der Ausstellung ist es, zu zeigen, inwiefern Literatur einen wichtigen Beitrag zum Verständnis und Problematisieren der Beziehung zwischen Mensch und nicht-menschlicher Natur leisten kann. Welche Aspekte dieser Beziehung werden angesprochen, zu welchem Zeitpunkt in der Literaturgeschichte und wie werden diese lyrisch gestaltet? Diese virtuelle Austellung ist hier in englischer Sprache zu finden.

Sabine Wilke

About the author

Wilke, Sabine

University of Washington, USA

Sabine Wilke is Professor of German at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching interests include modern German literature and culture, intellectual history and theory, and cultural and visual studies. She has written books and articles on body constructions in modern German literature and culture, German unification, the history of German film and theater, contemporary German authors and filmmakers. Most recently, Wilke was involved in a larger project about German colonialism and postcoloniality and the question of comparative colonialisms, especially how Germany related differently to Africa and the South Pacific. With assistance from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Wilke is directing a transatlantic research network on the environmental humanities and is working on a new project on environmental criticism, in particular the overlapping concerns of postcolonialism and ecocriticism.

Browse the exhibition

Fishing for Souls: Water Technology and the Dutch Baroque

by Lisa FitzGerald

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Arcadia, Autumn 2018, no. 26

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The Qianlong Emperor Hunting Hare: From the Qing Esthetics of Nature to an End of European Exceptionalism

by Philippe Forêt

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Arcadia, Autumn 2018, no. 25

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J. M. Rugendas’ Contribution to an Iconography of the Animal Condition in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Society

by Ana Lucia Camphora

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Arcadia, Autumn 2018, no. 24

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Art, Social Change, and the Green City: A Rebuke of Green Metropolitanization

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Perspectives Issue 2018/1

Rob Krueger argues that art provides a way of framing the disconnect between “green metropolitanization” and its emancipatory potential.

"‘Like a Stone’: Ecology, Enargeia, and Ethical Time in Alice Oswald's Memorial"

Through readings of the works of artist/sculptor Ilana Halperin and poet Alice Oswald, David Farrier explores the idea of Anthropocene as marked by haunted time.

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"Appropriating the Weather: Olafur Eliasson and Climate Control"

Hornby draws attention to the work of Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, whose immersive installations aim to increase environmental awareness, arguing that Eliasson’s environments are fully orchestrated affairs that share the technologies and efforts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ militarization of climate control.

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Photograph: Suna River, 1915

An early color photograph of the Suna River by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1863–1944), who is also featured in the picture.

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