Description
Book SynopsisNotes 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.
Trade ReviewAdorno’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. -- Susan Sontag
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. -- Edward Said
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. -- Fredric Jameson
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. -- Alexander García Düttmann, author of
Philosophy of ExaggerationAnyone who wants to understand Adorno’s philosophy must return to the judgments rendered about literature within these pages. -- Paul Kottman, author of
Love as Human FreedomTable of ContentsIntroduction to the Combined Edition, by Paul A. Kottman
Volume 1Translator’s Preface, by Shierry Weber Nicholsen
Editorial Remarks from the German Edition, by Rolf Tiedemann
Part I1. The Essay as Form
2. On Epic Naiveté
3. The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel
4. On Lyric Poetry and Society
5. In Memory of Eichendorff
6. Heine the Wound
7. Looking Back on Surrealism
8. Punctuation Marks
9. The Artist as Deputy
Part II10. On the Final Scene of Faust
11. Reading Balzac
12. Valéry’s Deviations
13. Short Commentaries on Proust
14. Words from Abroad
15. Ernst Bloch’s
Spuren16. Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukács’
Realism in Our Time17. Trying to Understand
EndgameVolume 2Translator’s Preface, by Shierry Weber Nicholsen
Editorial Remarks from the German Edition, by Rolf Tiedemann
Part III18. Titles: Paraphrases on Lessing
19. Toward a Portrait of Thomas Mann
20. Bibliographical Musings
21. On an Imaginary Feuilleton
22. Morals and Criminality: On the Eleventh Volume of the Works of Karl Kraus
23. The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer
24. Commitment
25. Presuppositions: On the Occasion of a Reading by Hans G. Helms
26. Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry
Part IV27. On the Classicism of Goethe’s
Iphigenie28. On Dickens’
The Old Curiosity Shop: A Lecture
29. Stefan George
30. Charmed Language: On the Poetry of Rudolf Borchardt
31. The Handle, the Pot, and Early Experience:
Ui, haww’ ich gesacht32. Introduction to Benjamin’s
Schriften33. Benjamin the Letter Writer
34. An Open Letter to Rolf Hochhuth
35. Is Art Lighthearted?
Notes
Index
