Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion

by Lambert Zuidervaart

Overview

This is the first book to put Aesthetic Theory into context and outline the main ideas and relevant debates, offering readers a valuable guide through this huge, difficult, but revelatory work.

Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory is a vast labyrinth that anyone interested in modern aesthetic theory must at some time enter. Because of his immense difficulty of the same order as Derrida - Adorno's reception has been slowed by the lack of a comprehensive and comprehensible account of the intentions of his aesthetics. This is the first book to put Aesthetic Theory into context and outline the main ideas and relevant debates, offering readers a valuable guide through this huge, difficult, but revelatory work. Its extended argument is that, despite Adorno's assumptions of autonomism, cognitivism, and aesthetic modernism, his idea of artistic truth content offers crucial insights for contemporary philosophical aesthetics.The eleven chapters are divided into three parts: Context, Content, and Critique. The first part offers a brief biography, describes Adorno's debates with Benjamin, Brecht, and Lukács, and outlines his philosophical program. The second part is an interpretation of Adorno's aesthetics, examining how he situates art in society, production, politics, and history and uncovering the social, political, and historical dimensions of his idea of artistic truth. The third part evaluates Adorno's contribution by confronting it with the critiques of Peter Bürger, Frederic Jameson, and Albrecht Wellmer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262740166
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/02/1993
Series:	Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the coeditor of four collections published by the MIT Press: with Nick Montfort, The New Media Reader (2003); with Pat Harrigan, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2003), Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), and Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2009). He is the author of Expressive Processing, published by the MIT Press in 2009.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
A Note on References
Introduction
I ConteXt
1 Historical Positions
1.1 Theodor W. Adorno (19031969)
1.2 Western MarXism
1.3 Critical Theory
2 Aesthetic Debates
2.1 Artistic Autonomy
2.2 Political Art
2.3 Aesthetic Modernism
3 Philosophical Motivations
3.1 ParataXis
3.2 Negative Dialectic
3.3 Critical Phenomenology
II Commentary
4 Society's Social Antithesis
4.1 MarXist Models
4.2 Art and Ideology
4.3 Advanced Capitalism and Autonomous Art
5 Art as Social Labor
5.1 Artistic Material
5.2 Modes of Production
5.3 The Artist as Worker
6 Political Migration
6.1 Artistic Import
6.2 Political Impact
6.3 Cultural Politics
7 ParadoXical Modernism
7.1 Culture after Auschwitz
7.2 Reification and Reconciliation
7.3 Adorno's Engame
8 Truth and Illusion
8.1 Antinomies of Illusion
8.2 Redemption of Import
8.3 Modern Art and Negative Dialectic
III Criticism
9 Models of Mediation
9.1 Adorno and Bürger
9.2 Autonomy, Truth, and Popular Art
9.3 Normative Aesthetics
10 Politics of Postmodernism
10.1 Deprivileged Subject
10.2 Jameson's Ambivalent Postmodernism
10.3 Beyond Reification
11 History, Art, and Truth
11.1 Wellmer's Stereoscopic Critique
11.2 Philosophical Truth Claims
11.3 Historical Truth Content
Notes
Bibliography
IndeX

Editorial Reviews

"This is a rich and generous book. The wealth of information on twentieth century European debates in aesthetics and cultural criticism is more than matched by the complexity and subtlety of the interpretation of Adorno's aesthetics."--Thomas Huhn, "The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism"

"Zuidervaart makes helpful comparisons between Adorno's thought and that of Benjamin and Lukacs and illuminates very clearly the decisive Kantian and, especially, Hegelian elements in Adorno's complex ensemble of concepts.... In all, this is a book that does considerable justice to the subtlety and sheer range of Adorno's thought."--Nicholas Walker, "Times Higher Education Supplement"

& quot; This is a rich and generous book. The wealth of information on twentieth century European debates in aesthetics and cultural criticism is more than matched by the complexity and subtlety of the interpretation of Adorno's aesthetics.& quot; -- Thomas Huhn, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

& quot; Zuidervaart makes helpful comparisons between Adorno's thought and that of Benjamin and Luk& aacute; cs and illuminates very clearly the decisive Kantian and, especially, Hegelian elements in Adorno's complex ensemble of concepts.... In all, this is a book that does considerable justice to the subtlety and sheer range of Adorno's thought.& quot; -- Nicholas Walker, Times Higher Education Supplement

" This is a rich and generous book. The wealth of information on twentieth century European debates in aesthetics and cultural criticism is more than matched by the complexity and subtlety of the interpretation of Adorno's aesthetics." --Thomas Huhn, "The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism"

" Zuidervaart makes helpful comparisons between Adorno's thought and that of Benjamin and Luká cs and illuminates very clearly the decisive Kantian and, especially, Hegelian elements in Adorno's complex ensemble of concepts.... In all, this is a book that does considerable justice to the subtlety and sheer range of Adorno's thought." --Nicholas Walker, "Times Higher Education Supplement"

--Thomas Huhn, "The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism"

From the Publisher