Aesthetic Theory (Theory and History of Literature) [Paperback]

Theodor W. Adorno (Author), Robert Hullot-Kentor (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 12, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0816618003 | ISBN-13: 978-0816618002 | Edition: 1

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.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While the imitators of great literary theorists may have produced the least lucid, most jargon-laden and most parodied literary and cultural criticism since the 18th century, editors Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse of the University of Minnesota's Theory and History of Literature series cannot be blamed for such excesses. Their 88-volume series, which contains some of the most cogent though still challenging criticism of the last 15 years, terminates with a volume from the controversial late Yale deconstructionist Paul de Man (Aesthetic Ideology) and a retranslated edition of mid-century Frankfurt School leader Theodore Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. This dignified leave-taking preempts the empty millennial speculation currently dominating postmodern studies, and leaves in its wake a generation of scholars reared on the series. (De Man: $49.95, 224p ISBN 0-8166-2203-5, $19.95 paper -2204-3; Adorno: $39.95, 448p ISBN 0-8166-1799-6, cloth only)
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

“….the fact that they [Continuum] are putting low price tags on works once published in expensive academic editions is something of which we can all be glad..” –Modern Painters, 2/05 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (August 12, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816618003
• ISBN-13: 978-0816618002
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #146,537 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 97 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars in English we've never experienced Adorno's thought till now, June 20, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Aesthetic Theory (Theory and History of Literature) (Hardcover)

Theodor Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory" is in one respect about the end of art;it was written partially in response to his friend Walter Benjamin. Benjamin's views on the ends of art and the pontentialities, the encrusted meanings waiting to me unleashed in mass produced art. Benjamin had thought there was an emancipatory moment in art in now the age of mechanical production. Since Adorno had outlived Benjamin until 1969, Adorno's task was to furnish us with the conception of art now as a pennyless child gazing into the candystore, an art in exile, an art where the disintegration of cultural pillars have long eroded away. Schoenberg's varigated orchestral scores was the ultimate rebellion in a private world, the subject at last trying to find truth and resemblance within the aesthetic crumbs leftover from the 19th century.

Adorno's " Aesthetic Theory" is not only a treatise, a counterflow, a tone-poem of fragments, symphonic forms exploded into motives and cells of thought, it is a bridge between all arts,although the relativily new form of film is neglected. Adorno had thought this fragmentary style of writing as satisfying with the collapse of system-building within philosophic thought.The aesthetic strategy of Adorno's thought then is one which interfaces, interrelates, crosses itself in its various readings of art. And the reader expects this complexity to be apparent. Robert Hullot-Kentor's translation is indeed something which encourages this reading of Adorno. He allows us to enter Adorno's thought in its full complexity. So, graphically he allows the undivision of paragraphs to remain as Adorno had originally composed in draft form. Adorno's thought continually overflows,continually creates layers, multilayers of references. Hullot-Kentor's term "paratactical form" is the localized struture of Adorno's thought and if form at all survives it is within this density of Adorno's thought and not any external structure. The first English translation by C. Lenhardt(1984)! maintains these divisions within the body of text and is still indespensible despite all the American jargon.Adorno's thought on first encounter needs all the divisions one can find,but once learned you can move beyond it into Hullot-Kentor's. The introduction to Hullot-Kentor provides a good history of Adorno's work with aesthetics a subject he came to late within these treatise-like dimensions. Adorno has been the focus of numerous studies, Frederic Jameson,Martin Jay, Albrecht Wellmer,Peter Berger, as well as art critics Donald Kuspit. Lambert Zuidervaart has a book-length critique of "Aesthetic Theory". All have used Adorno's thought to advance a particular cause mostly justified.Jameson's diatribes with the post-structural cadre for one, Wellmer in making a bridge to the communicative theories of Adorno's former assistant Jurgan Habermas. Who has been left out of this theoretical landscape? has been the practicing artist, and understandibly so for those I've mentioned are not burdened with the daily committment to creation of the artistic object and the set of philosophic problematics that entails. As a practicing composer myself I came to Adorno long ago, his "Philosophy of Modern Music" was a seminal text, a breath of fresh air from the self-serving pitch-set-theory ideas of academia. In fact Adorno's legacy is only now entering the mainstream of thought in musicology, with profound contributions into the creativity,and historical dimensions in opera,social sub-themes in the 19th century or new music. "Aesthetic Theory" is a fundamental resource for the composer, the poet, the performing artist,especially within the collapse of genre distinctions in today's art. Within the complexity of Adorno's thought we find the crossing of genres. Although he had structured his thought for quite different reasons for the search in locating truth and meaning and non-meaning wherever it may reside.In "Aesthetic Theory"although you may only find the grand auteurs,Kafka,! Mahler,Wedekind,Proust,certainly Beckett(where Adorno had found a pinnicle of his idea of the disintegration of value) we today can find parallels for creativity in the collapse of genre distinctions today. Certainly the positive side of postmodernity has been the proclivity toward research. A composer for instance may learn the complexity of Central American culture as pre-compositional studies for a set of piano preludes, a wonderful enrichment of the genre. If nothing else Adorno's thought compells one toward research and the meaning in art from a conceptual global perspective. For that's the definition of truth that Adorno adheres to. Truth must reside for everyone, truth is not an elitist endeavor. The truth content in a Beethoven symphony for instance is in its relative accessible directness of musical gesture. You, anyone understands his musical motives immediately. It was this clearness of meaning which produced a conceptual impasse within for instance Mahler who could not resolve the dilemma of the symphonic form apart from accreting its length. Today then a composer in his/her search for instance can no longer ignore the complex use of text, and the challenge that represents, or a playwright in the subtle use of lighting. Every creative artist must explore his/her creativity beyond the four-corners of the page, and I'd like to offer this perspective as one part of Adorno's legacy.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A pyramidal corpus of smart ideas!, January 13, 2009

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Hiram Gomez Pardo (Valencia, Venezuela) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Aesthetic Theory (Theory and History of Literature) (Paperback)

"The darkening of the world makes rational the irrational in art: it's an irrationality radically obscured". "The art doesn't imitate neither the nature nor to a concrete natural beauty, but the natural beauty by itself." "The efforts of the art by saving, in the remaining, all the transient, flowing and temporal, defending it from the stuffing though art is familiarized with it, bear a tension between the objectifying technique and the mimetic essence of the works."

"Aesthetical theory" is a huge compendium of smart ideas, a whole corpus of clever and revealing concepts about the role of the art. His architectural intelligence and supreme erudition literally is an engaging tour de force, an impressive gallery of sharp reflections that will motivate you, dear reader.

Since I acquired it, this book has become one of my cult texts, whose relevant importance remains beyond any other superlative you want to label it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Antidote to Mass Culture of shallowness, October 25, 2010

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R. Gavilanes "pqls" (Nueva York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Aesthetic Theory (Theory and History of Literature) (Paperback)

This is an uncompromising reminder that art is not decoration, or popular culture, it is far most profound, and that our narrow perspective on the world structured by our ecstatic media frenzied mass culture is a false and brief illusion.
Adorno reaches accross centuries to find the importance of art in human endeavor and development, how art is part of articulating these and essential to historical progress.
I dont want to get into reviewing his text, I am not capable critiquing it, and other reviews have placed it in the historical/intellectual context. I dont know of any serious thinker in the last century that invested so much thought into the aesthethic philosophy of modernity, thus I find the ultimate philosophical text on modern art. For me Adorno's position hinges on his critique of catharsis as an unacheivable condition of modernity.
It is a refreshing and motivating book to withstand and overcome all the misinformation that is thrown at us constantly and irresposibly. His examples are mostly from music so it is much more abstract than the visual arts examples of most art theory. A must for anyone that really cares about art. I dare you to read this and go to some trendy galleries afterwards. I say this because it will make you see right trhough all the pretense, and long for the real, the universal, the historically significant workamd rediscover it.