Reading Baudelaire with Adorno

Reading Baudelaire with Adorno PDF Author: Joseph Acquisto
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 8765103025
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Reading Baudelaire with Adorno examines Charles Baudelaire's oeuvre – including verse poems, prose poems, and critical writings – in dialogue with the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, for whom the autonomy of the artwork critically resists any attempt to view it merely as a product of its socio-historic context. Joseph Acquisto analyzes Baudelairean duality through the lens of dissonance, arguing that the figure of the subject as a “dissonant chord” provides a gateway to Baudelaire's reconfiguration of subjectivity and objectivity in both esthetic and epistemological terms. He argues that Baudelaire's dissonance depends on older models of subjectivity in order to define itself via the negation of romantic conceptions of a unified lyric subject in favor of one constituted simultaneously as subject and object. This new understanding of subjectivity reconfigures our relationship to the work of art, which will always surpass conceptual attempts to know it fully. Acquisto offers a fresh take on some familiar themes in Baudelaire's work. Dissonant subjectivity in Baudelaire, rather than cancelling esthetic transcendence, points to a different way forward that depends on a new and dialectical relation of subject and object.

Reading Baudelaire with Adorno

Reading Baudelaire with Adorno PDF Author: Joseph Acquisto
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 8765103025
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Reading Baudelaire with Adorno examines Charles Baudelaire's oeuvre – including verse poems, prose poems, and critical writings – in dialogue with the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, for whom the autonomy of the artwork critically resists any attempt to view it merely as a product of its socio-historic context. Joseph Acquisto analyzes Baudelairean duality through the lens of dissonance, arguing that the figure of the subject as a “dissonant chord” provides a gateway to Baudelaire's reconfiguration of subjectivity and objectivity in both esthetic and epistemological terms. He argues that Baudelaire's dissonance depends on older models of subjectivity in order to define itself via the negation of romantic conceptions of a unified lyric subject in favor of one constituted simultaneously as subject and object. This new understanding of subjectivity reconfigures our relationship to the work of art, which will always surpass conceptual attempts to know it fully. Acquisto offers a fresh take on some familiar themes in Baudelaire's work. Dissonant subjectivity in Baudelaire, rather than cancelling esthetic transcendence, points to a different way forward that depends on a new and dialectical relation of subject and object.

Reading Baudelaire with Adorno

Reading Baudelaire with Adorno PDF Author: Joseph Acquisto
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Reading Baudelaire with Adorno examines Charles Baudelaire's oeuvre – including verse poems, prose poems, and critical writings – in dialogue with the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, for whom the autonomy of the artwork critically resists any attempt to view it merely as a product of its socio-historic context. Joseph Acquisto analyzes Baudelairean duality through the lens of dissonance, arguing that the figure of the subject as a “dissonant chord” provides a gateway to Baudelaire's reconfiguration of subjectivity and objectivity in both esthetic and epistemological terms. He argues that Baudelaire's dissonance depends on older models of subjectivity in order to define itself via the negation of romantic conceptions of a unified lyric subject in favor of one constituted simultaneously as subject and object. This new understanding of subjectivity reconfigures our relationship to the work of art, which will always surpass conceptual attempts to know it fully. Acquisto offers a fresh take on some familiar themes in Baudelaire's work. Dissonant subjectivity in Baudelaire, rather than cancelling esthetic transcendence, points to a different way forward that depends on a new and dialectical relation of subject and object.

Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature

Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature PDF Author: Corey McCall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351592963
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This collection features original essays that examine Walter Benjamin’s and Theodor Adorno’s essays and correspondence on literature. Taken together, the essays present the view that these two monumental figures of 20th-century philosophy were not simply philosophers who wrote about literature, but that they developed their philosophies in and through their encounters with literature. Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature is divided into three thematic sections. The first section contains essays that directly demonstrate the ways in which literature enriched the thinking of Benjamin and Adorno. It explores themes that are recognized to be central to their thinking—mimesis, the critique of historical progress, and the loss and recovery of experience—through their readings of literary authors such as Baudelaire, Beckett, and Proust. The second section continues the trajectory of the first by bringing together four essays on Benjamin’s and Adorno’s reading of Kafka, whose work helped them develop a distinctive critique of and response to capitalism. The third and final section focuses more intently on the question of what it means to gain authentically critical insight into a literary work. The essays examine Benjamin’s response to specific figures, including Georg Büchner, Robert Walser, and Julien Green, whose work he sees as neglected, undigested, or misunderstood. This book offers a unique examination of two pivotal 20th-century philosophers through the lens of their shared experiences with literature. It will appeal to a wide range of scholars across philosophy, literature, and German studies.

Adorno and Literature

Adorno and Literature PDF Author: David Cunningham
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826403689
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
First book to provide a comprehensive account of Adorno's aesthetic theory in relation to literature, now available in paperback.

The Lyric Theory Reader

The Lyric Theory Reader PDF Author: Virginia Jackson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421412004
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 678

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Book Description
Reading lyric poetry over the past century. The Lyric Theory Reader collects major essays on the modern idea of lyric, made available here for the first time in one place. Representing a wide range of perspectives in Anglo-American literary criticism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the collection as a whole documents the diversity and energy of ongoing critical conversations about lyric poetry. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins frame these conversations with a general introduction, bibliographies for further reading, and introductions to each of the anthology’s ten sections: genre theory, historical models of lyric, New Criticism, structuralist and post-structuralist reading, Frankfurt School approaches, phenomenologies of lyric reading, avant-garde anti-lyricism, lyric and sexual difference, and comparative lyric. Designed for students, teachers, scholars, poets, and readers with a general interest in poetics, this book presents an intellectual history of the theory of lyric reading that has circulated both within and beyond the classroom, wherever poetry is taught, read, discussed, and debated today.

Language and History in Adorno's Notes to Literature

Language and History in Adorno's Notes to Literature PDF Author: Ulrich Plass
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135866198
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno's Notes to Literature explores Adorno’s essays on literature as an independent contribution to his aesthetics with an emphasis on his theory and practice of literary interpretation. Essential to Adorno’s essays is his unorthodox treatment of language and history and his elaboration of the links between the two. One of Adorno’s major but often-neglected claims is that truth is relative to its historical medium, language. Adorno persistently and creatively tries to narrow the gulf between truth and expression, philosophy and rhetoric, and his essays on literature are practical examples of his effort to critically rescue the rhetorical dimension of philosophy. Rather than relying exclusively on aesthetic concepts inherited from his predecessors in the Western tradition (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard), Adorno’s essays seek to transgress and transcend the conceptual limitations of aesthetic discourse by appropriating a non-conceptual, metaphorical vocabulary borrowed from the literary texts he investigates. Thus, Adorno’s interpretations of literature mobilize an alternative subterranean, primarily essayistic and fragmentary discourse on language and history that eludes the categories that tend to predominate his thinking in his major work, Aesthetic Theory. This book puts forth the claim that Adorno’s essays on literature are of central relevance for an understanding of his aesthetics because they challenge the conceptual limitations of philosophical discourse.

The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry

The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry PDF Author: Maureen N. McLane
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139827901
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
More than any other period of British literature, Romanticism is strongly identified with a single genre. Romantic poetry has been one of the most enduring, best loved, most widely read and most frequently studied genres for two centuries and remains no less so today. This Companion offers a comprehensive overview and interpretation of the poetry of the period in its literary and historical contexts. The essays consider its metrical, formal, and linguistic features; its relation to history; its influence on other genres; its reflections of empire and nationalism, both within and outside the British Isles; and the various implications of oral transmission and the rapid expansion of print culture and mass readership. Attention is given to the work of less well-known or recently rediscovered authors, alongside the achievements of some of the greatest poets in the English language: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Scott, Burns, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Clare.

Philosophy of New Music

Philosophy of New Music PDF Author: Theodor W. Adorno
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452965692
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
An indispensable key to Adorno’s influential oeuvre—now in paperback In 1949, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music was published, coinciding with the prominent philosopher’s return to a devastated Europe after his exile in the United States. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Arnold Schoenberg reviled it. Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal to composition, rather than a matter of musical performance. Consisting of two distinct essays, “Schoenberg and Progress” and “Stravinsky and Reaction,” Philosophy of New Music poses the musical extremes in which Adorno perceived the struggle for the cultural future of Europe: between human emancipation and barbarism, between the compositional techniques and achievements of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In this translation, which is accompanied by an extensive introduction by distinguished translator Robert Hullot-Kentor, Philosophy of New Music emerges as an essential guide to the whole of Adorno's oeuvre.

The Cambridge Companion to Adorno

The Cambridge Companion to Adorno PDF Author: Tom Huhn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139826336
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
The great German philosopher and aesthetic theorist Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903–69) was one of the main philosophers of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. An accomplished musician, Adorno first focused on the theory of culture and art. Later he turned to the problem of the self-defeating dialectic of modern reason and freedom. In this collection of essays, imbued with the most up-to-date research, a distinguished roster of Adorno specialists explore the full range of his contributions to philosophy, history, music theory, aesthetics and sociology. New readers will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Adorno currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Adorno.

The Complete Correspondence 1928 - 1940

The Complete Correspondence 1928 - 1940 PDF Author: Theodor W. Adorno
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745692478
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
The surviving correspondence between Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. This is the first time all of the surviving correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin has appeared in English. Provides a key to the personalities and projects of these two major intellectual figures. Offers a compelling insight into the cultural politics of the period, at a time of social and political upheaval. An invaluable resource for all students of the work of Adorno and especially of Benjamin, extensively annotated and cross-referenced.