Greg Ellerman begins Thought's Wilderness by exploring the “unexpected affiliations” and surprising “conjuncture” between the Frankfurt school and the formative midcentury Romanticist criticism of M. H. Abrams, Paul de Man, and Geoffrey Hartman (7–8). In their distinct accounts of Romanticism as an imaginative project of repairing the “relation of mind to nature,” these influential critics, Ellerman argues, internalized key insights of “Adornian critical theory” regarding “capitalism's domination of nature” and “the critical or utopian possibilities latent in aesthetic forms.” In Ellerman's retelling of this story, Romantic writers recognized that the work of art, as an expression of “appropriative consciousness” determined by the capitalist value form (3), perpetuates human mastery over nature. The very impulse to reconcile with nature in an act of imaginative apprehension results in “nature's annihilation” (16). The intuition of this contradiction led Romantic writers to experiment with forms of aesthetic self-negation by which art could stage human...
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