Stanford Humanities Center
Bryan Norton is a scholar of media and the environment, specializing in German literature, philosophy, and visual culture. His work investigates how novel aesthetic forms and media formats are used by writers, filmmakers, and others to address the Gordian knot of environmental crisis, postcolonial upheaval, and technological change. His recent writings can be found in SubStance, Critical Inquiry, Cultural Politics, Modern Language Notes, the Journal of Visual Culture, and elsewhere. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania in 2022.
SHC Project
Fragments of the Concrete: Ecology and Technical Media in German Romanticism
Norton's first book, Planetary Idealism: The Technics of Nature in German Romanticism, takes its cue from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s suggestion that “[i]f Hegel were alive to plumb the depths of our sense of the present, he would notice an awareness of the planet and of its geobiological history.” Under advance contract with Stanford University Press, Planetary Idealism investigates how a set of poets and philosophers begin addressing the shifting relations between humans, technical media, and nature in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and start of the nineteenth. During this time, writers such as Novalis, Schelling, Goethe, Hölderlin, and Hegel turn to natural history, poetic experimentation, and Kant’s interrogation of a “technic of nature” in an effort to develop alternatives mode of inhabiting the planet at the outset of the Anthropocene.
Salt, his second book project, explores the vital role of an everyday mineral in the making of modernity. The book uncovers the diverse and surprising ways in which salt has come to form contemporary ideas about nature, culture, and even politics around the globe. Currently under review, the book explores the mineral’s centrality to a number of formats and contexts, from lithium extraction and salt tourism in Bolivia to the rise to fame of celebrity chef Nusret Gökçem, aka “Salt Bae.” Drawing particular attention to the mineral basis of digital media and infrastructure, Salt raises vital questions about how modern life has been composed, consumed, and is even dissolved.
Norton is also co-editing a volume of essays on the late philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler.
