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.

Reading Baudelaire with Adorno

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

Get Book Here

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.

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.

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.

The Lyric Theory Reader

The Lyric Theory Reader PDF Author: Virginia Walker 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.

The Writer of Modern Life

The Writer of Modern Life PDF Author: Walter Benjamin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674022874
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
"In this book Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank. More than a series of studies of Baudelaire, these essays show the extent to which Benjamin identifies with the poet and enable him to explore his own notion of heroism."--BOOK JACKET.

Baudelaire's Bitter Metaphysics

Baudelaire's Bitter Metaphysics PDF Author: Aaron Brice Cummings
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666961760
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Baudelaire’s Bitter Metaphysics: Anti-Nihilist Readings by Fondane, Benjamin, and Sartre reconstructs a philosophical trialogue that might have been expected to take place between Benjamin Fondane, Walter Benjamin, and Jean-Paul Sartre over their philosophical readings of Charles Baudelaire, an exchange preempted by the untimely deaths of two of the interlocutors during the Nazi holocaust. Why did three of Europe’s sharpest minds respond to the terror of 1933-45 by writing about a long-dead poet? Aaron Brice Cummings argues that Fondane, Benjamin, and Sartre turned to the poet of nihilism’s abyss because they recognized a fact of cultural history that remains relevant today: until sometime in the 2080s, the literary world will have to confront (even if to deny) the two-century window forecast by Nietzsche as the age of cultural and existential nihilism. Accordingly, the author examines the bitter metaphysics latent in Baudelaire’s motifs of the abyss, clocks, brutes, streets, and bored dandies. In so doing, this book confronts the nothingness which modern life encounters in the heart of art, ethics, ideality, time, memory, history, urban life, and religion.

Adorno's Nietzschean Narratives

Adorno's Nietzschean Narratives PDF Author: Karin Bauer
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791495973
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This is the first book to provide a broad and comparative analysis of the relationship of these two influential thinkers to one another. Defying conventional appropriations of Nietzsche's and Adorno's thought, Bauer establishes crucial links between different traditions of critical thought, suggesting elective and selective affinities in the pursuit of a radicalized critique of ideology and culture. Against Habermas, Bauer argues that Nietzsche did not abandon the project of modernity, but rather achieved its most radical confrontation with the myths of the Enlightenment. Bauer's inquiry into Nietzsche's and Adorno's critiques of rationality, historicism, metaphysics, and Bildung culminates in an exposition of their readings of Wagner, who serves as a medium and supplement for their critiques of modern culture.

Manifestoes and Transformations in the Early Modernist City

Manifestoes and Transformations in the Early Modernist City PDF Author: Professor Christian Hermansen Cordua
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409488470
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
The industrialization of the nineteenth-century European city facilitated developing conceptions of the model city, and allowed for large scale urban transformations. The urban discourse in the latter half of the nineteenth century was consequently dominated by a dialectic exchange between the ideal and the practical, a debate played out in the formation of the modern metropolis. Manifestoes and Transformations is the first work to deal with urban utopias and their relationship with actual urban interventions. Bringing together a carefully chosen, wide-ranging team of experts, the book provides a broad, contextual exploration of the ideas and urban practices which are the foundations of our conception of the contemporary city. As such, it is a valuable resource for students interested in the formation of the modernist city.

Twilight Memories

Twilight Memories PDF Author: Andreas Huyssen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113604230X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In this new collection of essays on memory and amnesia in the postmodern world, cultural critic Andreas Huyssen considers how nationalism, literature, art, politics, and the media are obsessed with the past. The great paradox of our fin-de-siecle culture is that novelty is even more associated with memory than with future expectation. Drawing heavily on the dilemmas of contemporary Germany, Huyssen's discussion of cultural memory illustrates the nature of contemporary nationalism, the work of such artists and thinkers as Anselm Kiefer, Alexander Kluge, and Jean Baudrillard, and many others. The book includes illustrations from contemporary Germany.

Nietzsche’s Nihilism in Walter Benjamin

Nietzsche’s Nihilism in Walter Benjamin PDF Author: Mauro Ponzi
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319392670
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
This book reconstructs the lines of nihilism that Walter Benjamin took from Friedrich Nietzsche that define both his theory of art and the avant-garde, and his approach to political action. It retraces the eccentric route of Benjamin's philosophical discourse in the representation of the modern as a place of “permanent catastrophe”, where he attempts to overcome the Nietzschean nihilism through messianic hope. Using conventions from literary criticism this book explores the many sources of Benjamin's thought, demonstrating that behind the materialism which Benjamin incorporates into his Theses on the Concept of History is hidden Nietzsche's nihilism. Mauro Ponzi analyses how Benjamin’s Arcades Project uses figures such as Baudelaire, Marx, Aragon, Proust and Blanqui as allegories to explain many aspects of modernity. The author argues that Benjamin uses Baudelaire as a paradigm to emphasize the dark side of the modern era, offering us a key to the interpretation of communicative and cultural trends of today.