Adorno again

[Ned]

OK I promise this is the last time I will ever ask this or any other forum to help me with exams, but:

On Friday I may have to do a very long essay on 'originality', and I'd like to do it on Adorno and the standardisation of mass culture. I've never actually read any Adorno. What should I read in the next forty-eight hours, either by him or about him? I have access to basically every book in the world.

 

[owen]

Dialectic of Enlightment
also
The Culture Industry (Routledge Anthology)
Do some bloody work, boy!

 

[Moodles]

Not by Adorno, but closely related:

Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

can be found in Illuminations by Benjamin.

This is a good one, especially if you are short on time. Much of Adorno's writing is extremely dense and somewhat long-winded.

I second the recommendation of The Culture Industry essay because it is also shorter and fairly easy to digest compared to some of his other writing.

 

[D7_bohs]

Fred Jameson's 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' is a good intro to lot of the debates both pro- and anti- Adorno - easier to read than any Adorno too; also essay by Habermas on the Dialectic of Enlightenment in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

 

[borderpolice]

What should I read in the next forty-eight hours, either by him or about him? I have access to basically every book in the world.

His book "Minima Moralia" is full of quotable material. if there's only one text of TWA, you'd like to read, it would have to be that. The most worked out treatment of aesthetics is in "Aesthetic Theory", his sustained investigation of (musical) aesthetics can be found in "Philosophie der neuen musik", which i don't think has been translated [its a bit bollox anyway ...]. as its been quite a while since i read him, i no longer remember if any of those contain explicit discussions of "originality".

 

[borderpolice]

I second the recommendation of The Culture Industry essay because it is also shorter and fairly easy to digest compared to some of his other writing.

while "culture industry" is certainly an important work, it shows Adorno at his worst, foaming with anger at popular culture (the way he misunderstands it). his interpretations of artists he deems progressive are more interesting.

 

[Ned]

Thanks a lot everyone!

 

[vershy versh]

Minima Moralia. Striking how he characterises the war as a sequence of stop-start campaigns lacking an 'epic' element; makes perfect sense given he was there watching it unfold in real time and that is the way these things happen, but the myth's been so strong in my lifetime that it's almost surreal to read about WW2 as anything other than some sort of epic historical narrative -- even something like Gravity's Rainbow which pulls it apart has a certain sweep to it.