The Fleeting Promise of Art: Adorno's Aesthetic Theory Revisited

Peter Uwe Hohendahl

Published by Cornell University Press 2013

The Fleeting Promise of Art

Adorno's Aesthetic Theory Revisited

Peter Uwe Hohendahl

https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801469282

Overview
Contents

About this book

Peter Uwe Hohendahl reexamines Adorno’s writings on aesthetics in light of the unexpected return of the aesthetic to today’s cultural debates.

Author / Editor information

Peter Uwe Hohendahl is Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of many books, including Reappraisals: Shifting Alignments in Postwar Critical Theory.

Reviews

Russell A. Berman, Walter A. Haas Professor in the HumanitiesStanford University, author of Fiction Sets You Free:

This masterful reassessment explores Adorno's standing within philosophical aesthetics (especially Kant), his engagement with visual art (especially primitivist modernism), and his intense, essayistic engagement with literature. Peter Uwe Hohendahl illuminates these divergent components of Adorno’s thinking and explains why Adorno is indispensable for thinking about art, literature, and aesthetics today.

Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley, author of Essays from the Edge:

Long admired on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the most incisive contributors to the ongoing development of critical theory, Peter Uwe Hohendahl focuses his attention in these essays on Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, whose abiding relevance he abundantly demonstrates. With the formidable erudition, analytic acumen, and exemplary lucidity his readers have come to expect, Hohendahl not only illuminates Adorno’s debts to predecessors such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud but also shows the power of his readings of artists like Goethe and Balzac. The Fleeting Promise of Art is certain to be recognized as a lasting contribution to twenty-first-century aesthetics.

Max Pensky, University of Binghamton, author of The Ends of Solidarity: Discourse Theory in Ethics and Politics:

The Fleeting Promise of Art is superb. Peter Uwe Hohendahl's scholarship is impeccable, and his prose is pellucid and elegant. Hohendahl has the philosophical acumen to make sense of Adorno’s notoriously difficult interpretations of the philosophy of German Idealism, the critical skills to analyze and interpret Adorno’s arguments for their overlooked strengths and weaknesses, and the historical sense to look for—but not dwell on—relevant underexplored explanations from the complex and rich intellectual history of Adorno’s life and times.

Peter Uwe Hohendahl:

[The Fleeting Promise]registers the profound shift in perspectives between [Aesthetic Theory's] initial reception in the context of the left radicalism of 1968 and the present moment. It is a shift which not only invites a return to but also paradoxically entails a historicization of Adorno which reveals an underground history of Critical Theory that can no longer be understood simply in terms of its 'progressive' recovery in the 1960s as part of the student revolt against the silence after 1945 regarding the crimes of the Third Reich....The Fleeting Promise of Art is an invitation to reread Adorno. The challenge of defending Adorno today may not have become easier, but it has become more interesting.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
List of Abbreviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I
1. Human Freedom and the Autonomy of Art: The Legacy of Kant Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
2. The Ephemeral and the Absolute: The Truth Content of Art Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
3. Aesthetic Violence: The Concepts of the Ugly and Primitive Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	79
Part II
4. Reality, Realism, and Representation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
5. A Precarious Balance: Rereading German Classicism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	129
Epilogue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	152
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 200
Keywords: modern aesthetics; radical autonomy; contemporary art; neoliberal art market; culture industry; literary aesthetics

eBook

Published: November 15, 2013
ISBN: 9780801469282