Adorno's Modernism
Art, Experience, and Catastrophe

The book is a study of Adorno's aesthetics, its philosophical background, and its account of aesthetic modernism.

Espen Hammer (Author)

9781107121591, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 September 2015

242 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.49 kg

Theodor W. Adorno's aesthetics has dominated discussions about art and aesthetic modernism since World War II, and continues to inform contemporary theorizing. Situating Adorno's aesthetic theory in the context of post-Kantian European philosophy, Espen Hammer explores Adorno's critical view of art as engaged in reconsidering fundamental features of our relation to nature and reality. His book is structured around what Adorno regarded as the contemporary aesthetician's overarching task: to achieve a vision of the fate of art in the modern world, while demonstrating its unique cognitive potential. Hammer offers a lively examination of Adorno's work through the central problem of what full human self-actualization would require, and also discusses the wider philosophical significance of aesthetic modernism. This book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of social philosophy, art, and aesthetics.

Preface
Introduction
1. Art and the problem of modernity
2. The beautiful and the sublime: an aesthetics of nature
3. The dialectic of aesthetic autonomy
4. Language, truth, and semblance
5. A topography of nothingness: Adorno on Beckett
6. Experience and metaphysics: the legacy of Kant
7. An aesthetics of negativity
Concluding remarks
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Art: general interest [Children's / Teenage YNA], Cognitivism, cognitive theory [JMAQ], Social & political philosophy [HPS], Philosophy: aesthetics [HPN], Western philosophy, from c 1900 - [HPCF], History of Western philosophy [HPC], Philosophy [HP], Military history: post WW2 conflicts [HBWS], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], Theory of art [ABA]