The art of transition: Language and history in Theodor W. Adorno's 'Notes to Literature'

This dissertation explores the contemporary literary-critical significance of Theodor W. Adorno's Notes to Literature. Adorno's contributions to academic discourse are seen primarily in the fields of sociology, musicology, aesthetics, and moral philosophy. This study presents a view of Adorno that centers on his essayistic interpretations of literature and his unsystematic meditations on language and history. Borrowing a musical expression coined by the composer Richard Wagner, Adorno describes his essays as enacting an "art of transition." I argue that this art of transition plays a crucial role in juxtaposing two traditionally opposed modes of literary interpretation: literary history and literary theory.; Both modes of interpretation co-exist precariously in Adorno's at times politically questionable over-interpretations of literature. However, Adorno's hermeneutics and politics of exaggeration do not amount to a philosophical blind spot that misses the peculiar "literariness" of literature. Rather, his art of transition introduces a surprisingly literary, metaphorical vocabulary to substitute for the conventional aesthetic categories employed in Aesthetic Theory. Instead of concepts such as semblance or mimesis, Adorno's essays make frequent use of metaphors such as "Rauschen" (rustling, rushing, murmuring), "Wunde" (wound) or "Beschworung" (invocation, conjuration). Thus, Adorno's interpretations of literature mobilize a subterranean, primarily essayistic and fragmentary discourse on language and history not fully subsumable under the categories that predominate his aesthetic thinking in other, more traditionally philosophical contexts.; The dissertation presents close readings of several of Adorno's essays on literature, taking into account both the rhetorical modes of Adorno's interpretations as well as their specific political intentions and historical contexts. It is in his essays that the anti-systematic thrust of Adorno's thought is most fully realized. I show that the occasional character of the essays does not represent a weakness. Rather, it is in responding to an occasion and in addressing a larger, non-academic public that Adorno develops some of his most original interpretations of literature, combining in unorthodox ways arguments from the areas of history, philology, and aesthetics.