Dialectical criticism: A study of Adorno and Abramovich (Theodor W. Adorno, Shalom Jacob Abramowich)

A cross-disciplinary project, which debates questions pertaining to both continental philosophy and Hebrew literature, my dissertation (titled: “Dialectical Criticism: A study of Adorno and Abramovich”) begins as a philosophical study of Theodor Adorno's concept of dialectical criticism. Negotiating an the other hand, criticism that borrows its yardsticks and standards from within culture, Adorno's idea of cultural criticism might look self-defeating at first glance. Rather than idealize its critical procedure, or promote the unfailing veracity of its vantage point, dialectical criticism endows its subject matter (i.e. cultural productions and processes) with the same weight it attaches to its own critical devices and termini. Thus, instead of providing a blueprint of political progress or moral improvement, Adorno's negative dialectic hopes to use the autonomy of the literary medium to provide an “enhanced perception” of the obstacles that impede progressive transformation. The idea that stands behind this procedure is both political and literary. Adorno's critical theory hopes to open a new space between criticism presents itself as a rich—and sometimes obstructive—moral watchdog, which should accompany any form of political intervention.; While the first half of the dissertation is dedicated to a thorough investigation of the philosophical foundations of dialectal criticism, the second half of the project involves a literary and historical investigation of a central issue in Hebrew literary history, that is, the critical paradigm associated with the classical work of Sh. Y. Abramovich (Mendele the Book-peddler). Utterly merciless in its scathing criticism of the Jewish pre-modern shtetl, Abramovich's work has been dubbed part and parcel of the Zionist negation of exile. Approaching Abramovich's work from an entirely different vantage point, my dissertation demonstrates that his work in fact thematizes and destabilizes what its critics hoped to assert dogmatically. Rather than a flat, politicized approach to the pre-modern Jewish life-world (one that calls for sacrificing the pre-modern in order to make a modernized Jewish life), Abramovich's texts in fact oblige us to view their pre-modern subject matter not only as a subject for progressive reform, but also as a carrier of an unrelenting moral and political demands.; Reading Abramovich's work both within the intellectual history of Jewish Enlightenment and—for the first time in its reception history—within a framework that at least questions the moral legitimacy of modernity and Enlightenment, my study promotes Abramovich as a historical figure whose stature should be reexamined and whose political interventions should be realigned with the current ideas of political and literary theory.