Abstract

Last Spring two important German books on aesthetics finally appeared in English: Adorno's unfinished Aesthetic Theory, intended to summarize his philosophy and sociology of modern culture, and Büger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, in many ways a dialogue with Adorno and critical theory.

Peter Bürger, a professor of French and comparative literature at the university of Bremen, has published extensively on a broad spectrum of classical to avant-garde literature, generally trying to combine an outline of a sociology of culture with detailed socio-historical anaylses of specific works. Bürger sees himself as a mediator between hermeneutics and critical theory. He is an avowed disciple of the Frankfurt School in that the recognizes the cognitive and potentially moral function of art, bound up with art's necessary aloofness from practice in bourgeois society.