Aesthetic Theory

Description

Theodor Adorno (1903-69) was undoubtedly the foremost thinker of the Frankfurt School, the influential group of German thinkers that fled to the US in the 1930s, including such thinkers as Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer. His work has proved enormously influential in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory. Aesthetic Theory is Adorno's posthumous magnum opus and the culmination of a lifetime's investigation. Analysing the sublime, the ugly and the beautiful, Adorno shows how such concepts frame and distil human experience and that it is human experience that ultimately underlies aesthetics. In Adorno's formulation 'art is the sedimented history of human misery'.

Promotion info

Adorno's magnum opus, in which he summarises his life's thinking on concepts of beauty, the ugly and the sublime.

Reviews

"...the fact that they [Continuum] are putting low price tags on works once published in expensive academic editions is something of which we can all be glad.." -Modern Painters, 2/05

Author description

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) was a founder and arguably the foremost thinker of the Frankfurt School. He worked with Max Horkheimer at the New York Institute for Social Research and later taught at the University of Frankfurt until his death in 1969. His work has proved enormously influential in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory.

Table of contents

Translator's Acknowledgement \ Translator's Introduction \ 1. Art, Society, Aesthetics \ 2. Situation \ 3. On the Categories of the Ugly, the Beautiful, and Technique \ 4. Natural Beauty \ 5. Art Beauty: Apparition, Spiritualization, Intuitability \ 6. Semblance and Expression \ 7. Enigmaticalness, Truth Content, Metaphysics \ 8. Coherence and Meaning \ 9. Subject-Object \ 10. Toward a Theory of the Artwork \ 11. Universal and Particular \ 12. Society \ 13. Paralimpomena \ 14. Theories On the Origin of Art \ 15. Draft Introduction \ Editor's Afterword.