Notes to Literature - (European Perspectives: A Social Thought and Cultural Criticism) by Theodor W Adorno (Paperback)

About the 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.

Book Synopsis

Notes to Literature is a collection of the great social theorist Theodor W. Adorno's essays on such writers as Mann, Bloch, Hölderlin, Siegfried Kracauer, Goethe, Benjamin, and Stefan George. It also includes his reflections on a variety of subjects, such as literary titles, the physical qualities of books, political commitment in literature, the light-hearted and the serious in art, and the use of foreign words in writing. This edition presents this classic work in full in a single volume, with a new introduction by Paul Kottman.

Review Quotes

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 Exaggeration

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.--Susan Sontag

Anyone 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 Freedom

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

About the Author

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 Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe (2009).