Retirement of Founding Director Winfried Menninghaus
Winfried Menninghaus was Director of the Department of Language and Literature at MPIEA from 2013 until the end of 2022.
On December 31, 2022, Winfried Menninghaus’s term of office at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics came to an end. In 2013, he was appointed as one of the founding directors of the Institute and has since headed the Department of Language and Literature. As is customary in the Max Planck Society, the department was closed upon his retirement.
Winfried Menninghaus primarily focused his research at our Institute on the aesthetically relevant features of linguistic utterances and texts and on the mechanisms of their cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic effects in poetry, literary prose, and everyday language. Special emphasis was placed on what Roman Jakobson refers to as “parallelisms,” repetitive-variant patterns in the phonology, morphology, and syntax of aesthetic language. For the first time, these patterns and their effects were empirically investigated in a more comprehensive way in Menninghaus’s department. Moreover, ancient speculations on the affinity of poems and songs with respect to melodic patterns could be put on a new basis in a multi-methodical way.
Beyond the narrower field of the aesthetics of language, members of Menninghaus’s department have published numerous theoretical and empirical studies, in particular on the properties and effects of what already the philosopher Kant had conceptualized as “ästhetische Gefühle”—i.e., feelings that involve aesthetic evaluation and hence are predictive of “aesthetic liking.” One main area of focus was the previously poorly studied construct of being moved, including its physiological correlates (“chills,” goose bumps). In this context, the ‘paradox’ of taking pleasure in negative feelings, which has been much discussed since the Aristotelian theory of tragedy, was also given a new explanation from the perspective of the psychology of aesthetics.
Winfried Menninghaus received his doctorate from the University of Marburg in 1979 with a study on Walter Benjamin’s theory of the “magic” dimensions of language and Paul Celan’s poetry. In addition to studies on Shakespeare, Goethe, Klopstock, Hölderlin, Kafka, Ludwig Tieck, Gottfried Keller, Franz Kafka, and other authors, he has also published extensive books on the philosophy of beauty and disgust.
From 1985 to 1989, Winfried Menninghaus first worked as researcher and lecturer at what is now the Peter Szondi Institute at Freie Universität Berlin; he was subsequently appointed professor of comparative literature there, a position he held until 2013. He also had offers for distinguished senior professorships at Yale and Princeton Universities. In 2007, Winfried Menninghaus established the research cluster “Languages of Emotion” at Freie Universität Berlin, involving more than 20 different disciplines. It was in this context that he began his empirical research on the aesthetics of language.
In 2013, together with Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, he was appointed founding director of the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics. From April 2015 to March 2017, he was Managing Director of the still young institute. During this time, he also strongly advocated for the site of the former Dondorfsche Druckerei in Frankfurt-Bockenheim to become the future location of the Institute.
