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List of contents
Introduction
Corey McCall and Nathan Ross
Part I. Benjamin and Adorno: Literary Themes and Philosophical Debates
1. Against the Reification of History: Benjamin and Adorno on Baudelaire
Corey McCall
2. Theatrum Philosophicum: Thinking Literature and Politics with Walter Benjamin
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
3. Adorno and Beckett: Aesthetic Mimēsis and The Language of ‘The New’
Marcia Morgan
4. Abysmal Humanity: Anthropological Materialism in Georg Büchner and Walter Benjamin
Cat Moir
Part II. Kafka: ‘Fairy Tales for Dialecticians’
5. Breaking the Mythic Organization of Life: On Literary Form and Political Tendency in Benjamin’s Reading of Kafka
Nathan Ross
6. The Virtue or Power of the Useless: Benjamin and Adorno on Kafka
Idit Dobbs-Weinstein
7. Discovering the Truth of Sancho Panza: The Meaning of Comedy in Adorno’s and Benjamin’s Differing Readings of Don Quixote
Meanchem Feuer
Part III. Proust: Recovering Experience
8. The Proustian Roots of Adorno’s Idea of Social Criticism
Roger Foster
9. Seeing-In, Seeing-Through: Adorno and the Platonism of Proust
Owen Hulatt
Part IV: From Hölderlin to Walser: Poetic Afterlives
10. Hölderlin’s Aesthetic Critique of Modernity
Michael J. Thompson
11. Benjamin on Hölderlin’s Poetic Cosmos
Hyun Höchsmann
12. Wo bist Du Nachdenkliches! Poetic Determinability in Hölderlin and Walser
Stéphane Symons
13. Robert Walser as an Undigested Literary Phenomenon
Jeffrey A. Bernstein
About the author
Corey McCall is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elmira College, USA
Nathan Ross is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma City University, USA
Summary
This book examines Benjamin’s and Adorno’s essays and correspondence on literature. Taken together, the essays present the view that these two monumental figures of 20th-century philosophy were not simply philosophers who wrote about literature, but that they developed their philosophies in and through their encounters with literature
