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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'.
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.
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'.