Notes to Literature

by Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann (Editor), Paul Kottman (Introduction)

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.

546 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 1, 2019

About the author

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.

Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.

Reviews

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book, which was a selection from Adorno's much longer volumes on literary works, rather quickly. However, I did come away with a few interesting snapshots and takeaways which left me with the following impressions: 1) I agree with Adorno's basic premise that, for the generations born after World War 2, there is no question of the vitality of culture in a post-Auschwitz world; 2) so, too, Adorno points out that the adults whose only exposure to reading is in the form of consuming the Harry Potter series of novels or editions of Stephen King are engaging in a curiously vacant form of synthetic behavior that is devoid of human initiative or intelligence; 3) the movie comedies that I once loved to see exhibited are in fact testimonials to a human freedom which has since expired; 4) the observations on jazz music, for which Adorno has been criticized (perhaps correctly) seem on this reading to be more accurate to me in that, considering that fact that Adorno passed away in the early 1960s, prior to the electric Miles Davis music and way before John Zorn's Satanic shamanistic output -- in fact, I would even say that all music prior to the heightening of the Vietnam War was an industry ordered by a highly regulated and commercial-oriented menu of controlled artistic packages that was admittedly about bondage and servitude as much as it represented freedom and 'wild' animality. This book, like almost all of Adorno's books, contains symphonies of word-thoughts to my strained American ears. Three stars.