Overview

Having studied philosophy at a time when its traditions were being seriously uprooted by the atrocities of World War II, Theodor Adorno had an enormous impact on thinking about aesthetics at a transitional historical moment when the philosophy of science and leftist politics were looking for new ground. Moreover, with his focus on the rise of commercial culture and its effects on identity-construction, Adorno can be said to have reinvigorated modernist concerns by introducing the prevailing terms in our contemporary versions of cultural politics and cultural studies. Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism traces Adorno’s social and aesthetic ideas as they appear and reappear in his corpus. As per other volumes in the series, this book is divided into three parts. The first, “Adorno’s Keywords,” is organized by the aesthetic terms around which Adorno’s philosophy circulates. The second section is devoted to “Adorno and Aesthetics.” While Adorno’s philosophical viewpoints influenced modernism’s evolution into the 21st century, the history of modernist aesthetics also shaped his philosophical approaches. The third and final part, “Adorno’s Constellations,” discusses how aesthetic form in Adorno’s thinking underlies the terms of his social analysis.

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9781501370311

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Reading this dazzling collection of essays is like gazing through a kaleidoscope after a fresh constellation of colored glass has been created by a twist of the hand. For readers who think they already know everything that Adorno had to say about modernism and modernity, the results will be both illuminating and unsettling. * Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History Emeritus, UC, Berkeley, USA * Even as it was failing and fading, modernism for Adorno remained an expression and the signature immanent critique of the modes of domination and repression constitutive of capitalist modernity. In this vibrating series of essays, Adorno's habitation in modernism is surveyed, exemplified, and expanded. Beyond the expected engagements with his modernist aesthetics and music, his writings on lyric poetry, Beckett, mimesis, and culture industry, the reader will also find essays connecting modernism with performance, camp, recorded music (on vinyl), and Adorno's trenchant musings on the human, animals, and the arts. A generous addition to the literature on Adorno's modernism. * J. M. Bernstein, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, New School for Social Research, USA *

Author Information

Robin Truth Goodman is Professor of English at Florida State University, USA. She is the author or editor of ten previous books, including Gender for the Warfare State: Literature of Women in Combat (2017) and, as editor, Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory (2016).

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