Aesthetics and Politics

Description

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.

Theodor Adorno was director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt from 1959 until his death in 1969. Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

These are key texts in the study of modernism, of expressionist drama and of realism, and of many closesly related general questions. ... It is genuinely an indispensable volume. -- Raymond Williams This is vital reading for anyone concerned with the relationship between art and socialism. -- John Fowles Unlike conventional anthologies of Marxist writings on art, Aestheticand Politics has the form of an intellectual epic, presented as a series of mutual confronations between its protagonists. * Telos *