Download or read book Adorno in America written by David Jenemann and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “For those inclined to dismiss Adorno’s take on America as the uncomprehending condescension of a mandarin elitist, David Jenemann’s splendid new book will come as a rude awakening. Exploiting a wealth of new sources, he persuasively shows the depth of Adorno’s engagement with the culture industry and the complexity of his reaction to it.” —Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley The German philosopher and cultural critic Theodor W. Adorno was one of the towering intellectual figures of the twentieth century, and between 1938 and 1953 he lived in exile in the United States. In the first in-depth account of this period of Adorno’s life, David Jenemann examines Adorno’s confrontation with the burgeoning American “culture industry” and casts new light on Adorno’s writings about the mass media. Contrary to the widely held belief—even among his defenders—that Adorno was disconnected from America and disdained its culture, Jenemann reveals that Adorno was an active and engaged participant in cultural and intellectual life during these years. From the time he first arrived in New York in 1938 to work for the Princeton Radio Research Project, exploring the impact of radio on American society and the maturing marketing strategies of the national radio networks, Adorno was dedicated to understanding the technological and social influence of popular art in the United States. Adorno carried these interests with him to Hollywood, where he and Max Horkheimer attempted to make a film for their Studies in Prejudice Project and where he befriended Thomas Mann and helped him craft his famous novel Doctor Faustus. Shuttling between insightful readings of Adorno’s theories and a rich body of archival materials—including unpublished writings and FBI files—Jenemann paints a portrait of Adorno’s years in New York and Los Angeles and tells the cultural history of an America coming to grips with its rapidly evolving mass culture. Adorno in America eloquently and persuasively argues for a more complicated, more intimate relationship between Adorno and American society than has ever been previously acknowledged. What emerges is not only an image of an intellectual in exile, but ultimately a rediscovery of Adorno as a potent defender of a vital and intelligent democracy. David Jenemann is assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont.
Download or read book The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists written by George Ritzer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-03-31 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting emerging research and ongoing reassessments of social theory, The Wiley- Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists offers significant updates and revisions to the original Blackwell Companion published a decade ago. Volume 1 Features updates and revisions to all essays from original volume, plus the addition of 11 new authors Includes six new essays featuring coverage of theorists not included in original volume: Ibn Khaldun, de Tocqueville, Schumpeter, Mannheim, Veblen, and Adorno Supplemented with comprehensive bibliographies on primary and secondary sources, with a brief reader's guide accompanying each essay Addresses continuing relevance of most theories and their importance to contemporary scholarship Volume 2 Features updates and revisions to all essays from original volume, plus the addition of 16 new authors Includes 11 new essays featuring coverage of theorists not included in original volume, including Deleuze, Bauman, Smith, Luhmann, Agamben, and others Supplemented with comprehensive bibliographies on primary and secondary sources, with a brief reader's guide accompanying each essay Essays placed in social and historical context to allow readers to see how theorists have responded to pressing contemporary social and political issues
Download or read book A Companion to Adorno written by Peter E. Gordon and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A definitive contribution to scholarship on Adorno, bringing together the foremost experts in the field As one of the leading continental philosophers of the last century, and one of the pioneering members of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno is the author of numerous influential—and at times quite radical—works on diverse topics in aesthetics, social theory, moral philosophy, and the history of modern philosophy, all of which concern the contradictions of modern society and its relation to human suffering and the human condition. Having authored substantial contributions to critical theory which contain searching critiques of the ‘culture industry’ and the ‘identity thinking’ of modern Western society, Adorno helped establish an interdisciplinary but philosophically rigorous study of culture and provided some of the most startling and revolutionary critiques of Western society to date. The Blackwell Companion to Adorno is the largest collection of essays by Adorno specialists ever gathered in a single volume. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, this important contribution to the field explores Adorno’s lasting impact on many sub-fields of philosophy. Seven sections, encompassing a diverse range of topics and perspectives, explore Adorno’s intellectual foundations, his critiques of culture, his views on ethics and politics, and his analyses of history and domination. Provides new research and fresh perspectives on Adorno’s views and writings Offers an authoritative, single-volume resource for Adorno scholarship Addresses renewed interest in Adorno’s significance to contemporary questions in philosophy Presents over 40 essays written by international-recognized experts in the field A singular advancement in Adorno scholarship, the Companion to Adorno is an indispensable resource for Adorno specialists and anyone working in modern European philosophy, contemporary cultural criticism, social theory, German history, and aesthetics.
Download or read book Adorno and Democracy written by Shannon L. Mariotti and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Adorno and Democracy, Shannon L. Mariotti explores how philosopher Theodor Adorno's fifteen years in the United States prompted a concern for and commitment to democracy that shaped the rest of his oeuvre. She analyzes the extensive and undervalued works Adorno composed in English for an American audience and traces the development of his political theory during the World War II era. Her unique study examines how Adorno changed his writing style while in the United States in order to directly address the public, which lay at the heart of his theoretical concerns. Despite his apparent contempt for popular culture, his work during this period clearly engages with a broader public in ways that reflect his deep desire to understand the problems and possibilities of democracy as enacted through the customs and habits of American citizens. Mariotti incisively demonstrates how Adorno's unconventional and challenging interpretations of U.S. culture can add conceptual rigor to political theory and remind Americans of the normative promise of democracy. Adorno and Democracy is an innovative contribution to critical debates about contemporary U.S. politics. -- from back cover.
Download or read book Adorno in America written by David Jenemann and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For those inclined to dismiss Adorno's take on America as the uncomprehending condescension of a mandarin elitist, David Jenemann's splendid new book will come as a rude awakening. Exploiting a wealth of new sources, he persuasively shows the depth of Adorno's engagement with the culture industry and the complexity of his reaction to it." --Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley The German philosopher and cultural critic Theodor W. Adorno was one of the towering intellectual figures of the twentieth century, and between 1938 and 1953 he lived in exile in the United States. In the first in-depth account of this period of Adorno's life, David Jenemann examines Adorno's confrontation with the burgeoning American "culture industry" and casts new light on Adorno's writings about the mass media. Contrary to the widely held belief--even among his defenders--that Adorno was disconnected from America and disdained its culture, Jenemann reveals that Adorno was an active and engaged participant in cultural and intellectual life during these years. From the time he first arrived in New York in 1938 to work for the Princeton Radio Research Project, exploring the impact of radio on American society and the maturing marketing strategies of the national radio networks, Adorno was dedicated to understanding the technological and social influence of popular art in the United States. Adorno carried these interests with him to Hollywood, where he and Max Horkheimer attempted to make a film for their Studies in Prejudice Project and where he befriended Thomas Mann and helped him craft his famous novel Doctor Faustus. Shuttling between insightful readings of Adorno's theories and a rich body of archival materials--including unpublished writings and FBI files--Jenemann paints a portrait of Adorno's years in New York and Los Angeles and tells the cultural history of an America coming to grips with its rapidly evolving mass culture. Adorno in America eloquently and persuasively argues for a more complicated, more intimate relationship between Adorno and American society than has ever been previously acknowledged. What emerges is not only an image of an intellectual in exile, but ultimately a rediscovery of Adorno as a potent defender of a vital and intelligent democracy. David Jenemann is assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont.
Download or read book America in Literature and Film written by Dr Ahmed Elbeshlawy and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utilizing Lacan's psychoanalytic theory and Žižek's philosophical adaption of it, this book brings into dialogue a series of modernist and postmodernist literary works, films, and critical theory that are concerned with defining America. Ahmed Elbeshlawy demonstrates that how America is perceived in certain texts reveals not only the idealization or condemnation of it, but an imago, or constructed image of the perceiver as well. In turn, texts which particularly focus on demonstrating how other texts about America communicate an untrustworthy message themselves communicate an unreliable message, inventing and reinventing a series of imagos of America. These imagos refer to both idealized and deformed images of America constructed by the perceivers of America. The first part of this book is concerned with modernist perceptions of America, and includes discussion of Adorno, Benjamin, Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, as well as Emerson and Seymour Martin Lipset. The second part is dedicated to postmodernist representations of America, focusing on texts by Edward Said, Ihab Hassan, Susan Sontag, David Shambaugh and Charles W. Brooks, and films including Lars von Trier's Dogville and D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation.
Download or read book Changing the World Changing Oneself written by Belinda Davis and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A captivating time, the 60s and 70s now draw more attention than ever. The first substantial work by historians has appeared only in the last few years, and this volume offers an important contribution. These meticulously researched essays offer new perspectives on the Cold War and global relations in the 1960s and 70s through the perspective of the youth movements that shook the U.S., Western Europe, and beyond. These movements led to the transformation of diplomatic relations and domestic political cultures, as well as ideas about democracy and who best understood and promoted it. Bringing together scholars of several countries and many disciplines, this volume also uniquely features the reflections of former activists.
Download or read book Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity written by Eric Oberle and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identity has become a central feature of national conversations: identity politics and identity crises are the order of the day. We celebrate identity when it comes to personal freedom and group membership, and we fear the power of identity when it comes to discrimination, bias, and hate crimes. Drawing on Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction between positive and negative liberty, Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity argues for the necessity of acknowledging a dialectic within the identity concept. Exploring the intellectual history of identity as a social idea, Eric Oberle shows the philosophical importance of identity's origins in American exile from Hitler's fascism. Positive identity was first proposed by Frankfurt School member Erich Fromm, while negative identity was almost immediately put forth as a counter-concept by Fromm's colleague, Theodor Adorno. Oberle explains why, in the context of the racism, authoritarianism, and the hard-right agitation of the 1940s, the invention of a positive concept of identity required a theory of negative identity. This history in turn reveals how autonomy and objectivity can be recovered within a modern identity structured by domination, alterity, ontologized conflict, and victim blaming.
Download or read book Theodor W Adorno written by Detlev Claussen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gives us our first clear look at how the man and his moment met to create “critical theory.” An intimate picture of the quintessential twentieth-century transatlantic intellectual, the book is also a window on the cultural ferment of Adorno’s day—and its ongoing importance in our own.
Download or read book Adorno and A Writing of the Ruins written by James Martin Harding and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1997-02-20 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that postmodernism has so shifted current critical paradigms that Adorno's work can best be assessed in terms of its relevance in specific localized contexts, this book pursues a course that preserves Adorno's opposition to hegemonic programs but that is also wary of Adorno's own (negative) penchant for totalizing concepts. Unlike recent works which attempt to synthesize Adorno's writings into a comprehensive system that then becomes either the focus of an overriding critique or an object of appropriation, Harding orders his book as a collection of essays whose loose association questions the structural totality of Adorno's thought. Though together the essays cover all the major issues of Adorno's thought and offer a wide critical survey of his writings, the diversity of their focus avoids a systematic reduction of Adorno's work into a reproducible technique or method. The result of this strategy is a far more dynamic analysis of Adorno than a mere critical reconstruction of his ideas. By applying Adorno's theories to works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, and Amiri Baraka, the book pushes critical discussion of Adorno into cultural contexts that, while perhaps new for Adorno scholars, reach out to those whose knowledge of Adorno is limited. This book is a fine introduction to the subtleties of Adorno's writing and a genuine contribution to Adorno scholarship.
Download or read book Idle Threats written by Andrew Lyndon Knighton and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-10-22 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 19th century witnessed an explosion of writing about unproductivity, with the exploits of various idlers, loafers, and “gentlemen of refinement” capturing the imagination o fa country that was deeply ambivalent about its work ethic. Idle Threats documents this American obsession with unproductivity and its potentials, while offering an explanation of the profound significance of idle practices for literary and cultural production. While this fascination with unproductivity memorably defined literary characters from Rip Van Winkle to Bartleby to George Hurstwood, it also reverberated deeply through the entire culture, both as a seductive ideal and as a potentially corrosive threat to upright, industrious American men. Drawing on an impressive array of archival material and multifaceted literary and cultural sources, Idle Threats connects the question of unproductivity to other discourses concerning manhood, the value of art, the allure of the frontier, the usefulness of knowledge,the meaning of individuality, and the experience of time, space, and history. Andrew Lyndon Knighton offers a new way of thinking about the largely unacknowledged “productivity of the unproductive,” revealing the incalculable and sometimes surprising ways in which American modernity transformed the relationship between subjects and that which is most intimate to them: their own activity.
Download or read book Marxism Intellectuals and Politics written by D. Bates and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-11-27 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What ought the political role of the intellectual to be? What challenges does the post-structuralist project present for Marxist accounts of the intellectual? This text, which includes important contributions from authors such as Montag and Sayers, considers different attempts by Marxist and post-Marxist writers to theorize these questions.
Download or read book Radio s America written by Bruce Lenthall and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orson Welles’s greatest breakthrough into the popular consciousness occurred in 1938, three years before Citizen Kane, when his War of the Worlds radio broadcast succeeded so spectacularly that terrified listeners believed they were hearing a genuine report of an alien invasion—a landmark in the history of radio’s powerful relationship with its audience. In Radio’s America, Bruce Lenthall documents the enormous impact radio had on the lives of Depression-era Americans and charts the formative years of our modern mass culture. Many Americans became alienated from their government and economy in the twentieth century, and Lenthall explains that radio’s appeal came from its capability to personalize an increasingly impersonal public arena. His depictions of such figures as proto-Fascist Charles Coughlin and medical quack John Brinkley offer penetrating insight into radio’s use as a persuasive tool, and Lenthall’s book is unique in its exploration of how ordinary Americans made radio a part of their lives. Television inherited radio’s cultural role, and as the voting tallies for American Idol attest, broadcasting continues to occupy a powerfully intimate place in American life. Radio’s America reveals how the connections between power and mass media began.
Download or read book Street Life and Morals written by Lesley Chamberlain and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With resonance for today, this book explores a significant crisis of German philosophy and national identity in the decades around World War II. German philosophy, famed for its high-minded Idealism, was plunged into crisis when Germany became an urban and industrial society in the late nineteenth century. The key figure of this shift was Immanuel Kant: seen for a century as the philosophical father of the nation, Kant seemed to lack crucial answers for violent and impersonal modern times. This book shows that the social and intellectual crisis that overturned Germany’s traditions—a sense of profound spiritual confusion over where modern society was headed—was the same crisis that allowed Hitler to come to power. It also describes how German philosophers actively struggled to create a new kind of philosophy in an effort to understand social incoherence and technology’s diminishing of the individual.
Download or read book The Curious Humanist written by Johannes von Moltke and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Weimar Republic, Siegfried Kracauer established himself as a trenchant theorist of film, culture, and modernity, and he is now considered one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century. When he arrived in Manhattan aboard a crowded refugee ship in 1941, however, he was virtually unknown in the United States and had yet to write his best-known books, From Caligari to Hitler and Theory of Film. Johannes von Moltke details the intricate ways in which the American intellectual and political context shaped Kracauer’s seminal contributions to film studies and shows how, in turn, Kracauer’s American writings helped shape the emergent discipline. Using archival sources and detailed readings, von Moltke asks what it means to consider Kracauer as the New York Intellectual he became in the last quarter century of his life. Adopting a transatlantic perspective on Kracauer’s work, von Moltke demonstrates how he pursued questions in conversation with contemporary critics from Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt, from Clement Greenberg to Robert Warshow: questions about the origins of totalitarianism and the authoritarian personality; about high and low culture; about liberalism, democracy, and what it means to be human. From these wide-flung debates, Kracauer’s own voice emerges as that of an incisive cultural critic invested in a humanist understanding of the cinema.
Download or read book Transatlantic Aliens written by Will Norman and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2016-11-27 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A cogent and innovative account of the politics of literary and artistic modernism in the early years of the Cold War . . . an exceptional book.” —Transatlantica In Transatlantic Aliens, Will Norman reorients our understanding of midcentury American culture by thinking dialectically about the interfusion of aesthetic and intellectual practices across both the cultural hierarchy and the Atlantic. Norman relays this critical narrative through a series of interlinked case studies of key figures, including C. L. R. James, Theodor Adorno, George Grosz, Raymond Chandler, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Steinberg. He discovers the strange afterlives of European modernism in disorientating and uncanny juxtapositions: the aesthetics of French symbolism flicker among the neon signs of a small town in the dead of night, and echoes of Mondrian’s grids are observed in the form of a boardroom sales chart. At the heart of Transatlantic Aliens is a conception of alienation that encompasses both its political and aesthetic valences. What unites the exilic figures it addresses is the desire to transform the practical experience of alienation into a positive resource for criticizing and coping with a reconfigured postwar landscape. Addressed to scholars and readers of American and comparative literatures as well as of cultural history and visual culture, the book combines assessments of individual artworks, novels, and other texts with more distant readings spanning time and space. A gallery of color plates beautifully illuminates the book’s analysis. Examining hardboiled fiction through Flaubert, New Yorker cartoons through modernist painting, and Bette Davis through Hegel and Marx, Transatlantic Aliens challenges and changes the way we understand modernism’s place in midcentury American culture.
Download or read book Adorno s Aesthetics of Music written by Max Paddison and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction to the aesthetics and sociology of music of the German philosopher and music theorist T. W. Adorno is the only book to deal comprehensively with this topic and it has quickly established itself as a classic text.
