Winfried Menninghaus is a leading literary scholar and philosopher whose work unites classical rhetoric, philosophical aesthetics, and modern empirical research. Grounded in ancient Greek and Latin poetics as well as aesthetic theory from Baumgarten and Kant onward, his scholarship offers influential interpretations of major German authors such as Klopstock, Hölderlin, Novalis, Kafka, and Celan. He has made major contributions to core aesthetic debates on beauty, the sublime, nonsense, disgust, and the purpose of art, emphasizing the central role of strong and even negative emotions in aesthetic experience. In his later work, he pioneered the integration of empirical methods into aesthetics, collaborating with psychologists, linguists, and neuroscientists to study sound, rhythm, and melody in poetic language. His research demonstrates how poetic parallelism and deliberate linguistic deviation jointly shape aesthetic appreciation and emotional response. Through this interdisciplinary approach, Menninghaus has played a key role in bridging humanistic theory and experimental aesthetics.