Notes to Literature

Theodor W. Adorno

Published by Columbia University Press 2019

Notes to Literature

Theodor W. Adorno
With contributions by: Paul Kottman

In the series European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism

https://doi.org/10.7312/ador17964

Overview
Contents

About this book

Notes to Literature is a collection of the great social theorist Theodor W. Adorno’s essays on such writers as Mann, Bloch, Goethe, and Benjamin, as well as his reflections on a variety of subjects. This edition presents this classic work in full in a single volume, with a new introduction by Paul Kottman.

Author / Editor information

Kottman Paul :

Paul Kottman (PhD, Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley; Habilitation, Aesthetics, Scientifica Nazionale, Italy) is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, with affiliation in Philosophy, at the New School. He is the author of Disinheriting the Globe: Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare (Hopkins, 2009), A Politics of the Scene (Stanford, 2008), and Love as Human Freedom (Stanford, forthcoming), the editor of Philosophers on Shakespeare (Stanford, 2009) and The Insistence of Art: Aesthetic Philosophy and Early Modernity (Fordham, 2017), and the translator of Cavarero: For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford, 2005). He is also the editor of the series Square One: First-Order Questions in the Humanities (Stanford).Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), an eminent critic, philosopher, and social theorist, was one of the major intellectual voices of the twentieth century and a leading member of the Frankfurt School. His many classic works include Minima Moralia, The Philosophy of New Music, Critical Models, Aesthetic Theory, Negative Dialectics, and, with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Rolf Tiedemann (1932–2018) was the editor of Adorno’s complete works.

Shierry Weber Nicholsen is a practicing psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in Seattle. She is the author of Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno's Aesthetics (1997) and the translator of a number of books by Adorno, including Hegel: Three Studies (1994); Habermas, including Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (2001); and other members of the Frankfurt School.

Paul Kottman is associate professor of comparative literature and chair of liberal studies at the New School. His books include Disinheriting the Globe: Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare (2009).

Reviews

Paul Kottman, author of Love as Human Freedom:
Anyone who wants to understand Adorno’s philosophy must return to the judgments rendered about literature within these pages.

Alexander García Düttmann, author of Philosophy of Exaggeration:
Notes to Literature is not only an important document of Adorno's interest in art and aesthetics, but it is also a groundbreaking examination of literature in general.

Fredric Jameson:
The most accessible works in Adorno’s canon, these short essays on literary and cultural subjects in reality touch on most of the major philosophical preoccupations of his life's work: ranging from figures like Beckett or Thomas Mann, Balzac or Dickens, Bloch or Lukacs to movements like surrealism and existentialism, they show what a dialectical analysis of poetic texts can yield as well as making some fundamental statements about the status of the intellectual and the political, social and historical function of art. In what must be the acid test for any translator, Shierry Weber Nicholsen expertly and reliably navigates the syntactical reefs.

Edward Said:
Eccentric, brilliant, unreadably readable, aphoristic and gnomic in the extreme, Adorno’s Notes to Literature stand by themselves as essays of genius. They are not simply criticism, they are literature.

Susan Sontag:
Adorno’s Notes to Literature . . . sets an inimitable, always exhilarating standard. A volume of Adorno’s essays is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
INTRODUCTION TO THE COMBINED EDITION Paul A. Kottman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
VOLUME ONE
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE Shierry Weber Nicholsen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
EDITORIAL REMARKS FROM THE GERMAN EDITION Rolf Tiedemann Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
PART I
1. The Essay as Form Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	29
2. On Epic Naiveté Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	48
3. The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	53
4. On Lyric Poetry and Society Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
5. In Memory of Eichendorff Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	74
6. Heine the Wound Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	96
7. Looking Back on Surrealism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	102
8. Punctuation Marks Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	106
9. The Artist as Deputy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	112
PART II
10. On the Final Scene of Faust Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
11. Reading Balzac Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	132
12. Valéry’s Deviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	147
13. Short Commentaries on Proust Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
14. Words from Abroad Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	188
15. Ernst Bloch’s Spuren Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	201
16. Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukács’ Realism in Our Time Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
17. Trying to Understand Endgame Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
VOLUME TWO
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE Shierry Weber Nicholsen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	271
EDITORIAL REMARKS FROM THE GERMAN EDITION Rolf Tiedemann Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	273
PART III
18. Titles: Paraphrases on Lessing Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	283
19. Toward a Portrait of Thomas Mann Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	291
20. Bibliographical Musings Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	298
21. On an Imaginary Feuilleton Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	309
22. Morals and Criminality: On the Eleventh Volume of the Works of Karl Kraus Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	316
23. The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	332
24. Commitment Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	348
25. Presuppositions: On the Occasion of a Reading by Hans G. Helms Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	364
26. Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	376
PART IV
27. On the Classicism of Goethe’s Iphigenie Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	415
28. On Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop: A Lecture Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	430
29. Stefan George Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	437
30. Charmed Language: On the Poetry of Rudolf Borchardt Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	451
31. The Handle, the Pot, and Early Experience: Ui, haww’ ich gesacht Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	466
32. Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	474
33. Benjamin the Letter Writer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	485
34. An Open Letter to Rolf Hochhuth Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	491
35. Is Art Lighthearted? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	497
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	505
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	519

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;General/trade;

eBook

Published: October 21, 2019
ISBN: 9780231550291