SIMON RICHTER is professor of German literature and cinema at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain and Missing the Breast: Gender, Fantasy and the Body in the German Enlightenment and past president of the Goethe Society of North America. More recently his research in literature and culture has taken an ecological turn. He is particularly interested in imagining water worlds; the hydrology of the subject; and links between language, landscape and the ego.