Aesthetic Theory

by Theodor W. Adorno

Overview

Theodor Adorno (1903-69) was undoubtedly the foremost thinker of the Frankfurt School, the influential group of German thinkers that fled to the US in the 1930s, including such thinkers as Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer. His work has proved enormously influential in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory. Aesthetic Theory is Adorno's posthumous magnum opus and the culmination of a lifetime's investigation. Analysing the sublime, the ugly and the beautiful, Adorno shows how such concepts frame and distil human experience and that it is human experience that ultimately underlies aesthetics. In Adorno's formulation 'art is the sedimented history of human misery'. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780485300697
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/01/2001
Series:	Continuum Impacts , #43
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) was a founder and arguably the foremost thinker of the Frankfurt School. He worked with Max Horkheimer at the New York Institute for Social Research and later taught at the University of Frankfurt until his death in 1969. His work has proved enormously influential in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory.

Editorial Reviews

One of the most important philosophical works -- and perhaps the most important study of aesthetics -- of the 20th century.

Choice

...[A] densely written, yet philosophically expansive, aesthetics, at once negative and positive....Like their best works, Aesthetic Theory contains the stubborn insight — rarely offered by cultural critics today — that redemption may be glimpsed only by means of the most difficult and determined artistic ciphers of negation.
— Art Journal

Stephen F. Eisenman