Notes to Literature: (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

Notes to Literature is a collection of the great social theorist Theodor W. Adorno's essays on such writers as Mann, Bloch, Hölderlin, Siegfried Kracauer, Goethe, Benjamin, and Stefan George. It also includes his reflections on a variety of subjects, such as literary titles, the physical qualities of books, political commitment in literature, the light-hearted and the serious in art, and the use of foreign words in writing. This edition presents this classic work in full in a single volume, with a new introduction by Paul Kottman.

Table of Contents:
Introduction to the Combined Edition, by Paul A. Kottman Volume 1 Translator’s Preface, by Shierry Weber Nicholsen Editorial Remarks from the German Edition, by Rolf Tiedemann Part I 1. The Essay as Form 2. On Epic Naiveté 3. The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel 4. On Lyric Poetry and Society 5. In Memory of Eichendorff 6. Heine the Wound 7. Looking Back on Surrealism 8. Punctuation Marks 9. The Artist as Deputy Part II 10. On the Final Scene of Faust 11. Reading Balzac 12. Valéry’s Deviations 13. Short Commentaries on Proust 14. Words from Abroad 15. Ernst Bloch’s Spuren 16. Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukács’ Realism in Our Time 17. Trying to Understand Endgame Volume 2 Translator’s Preface, by Shierry Weber Nicholsen Editorial Remarks from the German Edition, by Rolf Tiedemann Part III 18. Titles: Paraphrases on Lessing 19. Toward a Portrait of Thomas Mann 20. Bibliographical Musings 21. On an Imaginary Feuilleton 22. Morals and Criminality: On the Eleventh Volume of the Works of Karl Kraus 23. The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer 24. Commitment 25. Presuppositions: On the Occasion of a Reading by Hans G. Helms 26. Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry Part IV 27. On the Classicism of Goethe’s Iphigenie 28. On Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop: A Lecture 29. Stefan George 30. Charmed Language: On the Poetry of Rudolf Borchardt 31. The Handle, the Pot, and Early Experience: Ui, haww’ ich gesacht 32. Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften 33. Benjamin the Letter Writer 34. An Open Letter to Rolf Hochhuth 35. Is Art Lighthearted? Notes Index

About the Author :
Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), an eminent critic, philosopher, and social theorist, was one of the major intellectual voices of the twentieth century and a leading member of the Frankfurt School. His many classic works include Minima Moralia, The Philosophy of New Music, Critical Models, Aesthetic Theory, Negative Dialectics, and, with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Rolf Tiedemann (1932–2018) was the editor of Adorno’s complete works. Shierry Weber Nicholsen is a practicing psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in Seattle. She is the author of Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno's Aesthetics (1997) and the translator of a number of books by Adorno, including Hegel: Three Studies (1994); Habermas, including Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (2001); and other members of the Frankfurt School. Paul Kottman is associate professor of comparative literature and chair of liberal studies at the New School. His books include Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe (2009).

Review :
Adorno’s Notes to Literature . . . sets an inimitable, always exhilarating standard. A volume of Adorno’s essays is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature. Eccentric, brilliant, unreadably readable, aphoristic and gnomic in the extreme, Adorno’s Notes to Literature stand by themselves as essays of genius. They are not simply criticism, they are literature. The most accessible works in Adorno’s canon, these short essays on literary and cultural subjects in reality touch on most of the major philosophical preoccupations of his life's work: ranging from figures like Beckett or Thomas Mann, Balzac or Dickens, Bloch or Lukacs to movements like surrealism and existentialism, they show what a dialectical analysis of poetic texts can yield as well as making some fundamental statements about the status of the intellectual and the political, social and historical function of art. In what must be the acid test for any translator, Shierry Weber Nicholsen expertly and reliably navigates the syntactical reefs. Notes to Literature is not only an important document of Adorno's interest in art and aesthetics, but it is also a groundbreaking examination of literature in general. Anyone who wants to understand Adorno’s philosophy must return to the judgments rendered about literature within these pages.