Notes to Literature / Edition 1

by Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann, Shierry Weber Nicholson, Paul Kottman

Overview

-A volume of Adorno's essays is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature. -Susan Sontag

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231063333
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	06/17/1993
Series:	European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	350
Product dimensions:	5.85(w) x 8.95(h) x 0.75(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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). I chose him as a reader for his expertise in contemporary political philosophy, aesthetics, and drama.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Combined Edition, by Paul A. Kottman
Volume 1
Translator’s Preface, by Shierry Weber Nicholsen
Editorial Remarks from the German Edition, by Rolf Tiedemann
Part I
1. 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 II
10. 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 Spuren
16. Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukács’ Realism in Our Time
17. Trying to Understand Endgame
Volume 2
Translator’s Preface, by Shierry Weber Nicholsen
Editorial Remarks from the German Edition, by Rolf Tiedemann
Part III
18. 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 IV
27. On the Classicism of Goethe’s Iphigenie
28. 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 gesacht
32. Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften
33. Benjamin the Letter Writer
34. An Open Letter to Rolf Hochhuth
35. Is Art Lighthearted?
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

The second volume comprising translation (by Shierry Weber Nicholsen) of essays by the eminent German thinker contains many that have not previously been translated and are less well known in America. Volumes 3 and 4 of Noten zur Literatur are presented here--essays on works of Mann, Bloch, Holderlin, and others, and reflections on a variety of literary topics. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Anyone who wants to understand Adorno’s philosophy must return to the judgments rendered about literature within these pages.

Paul Kottman

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

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

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

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

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