THE THEORY OF THE ESSAY: LUKACS, ADORNO, AND BENJAMIN

This study treats three German philosopher-critics--Georg Lukacs, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Benjamin--whose theories of the essay, considered together, are the most comprehensive attempt yet made to define the essay as a cognitive and philosophical form. The introduction envisages a descriptive-historical poetics of the essay as a methodological standard by which to evaluate the theories just mentioned. The aim of such a poetics would be to elucidate the ways in which particular cognitive projects are actualized in essays through specific literary-discursive devices.;The central chapters offer a close analysis of the ideas of Lukacs, Adorno, and Benjamin on the essay, situating each theory in its historical and intellectual context. (The two main documents here are Lukacs' 1910 essay on the essay in his Soul and Form, and Adorno's 1958 "The Essay as Form," in his Notes on Literature. Benjamin left no explicit theory of the essay; his ideas on philosophical method and form--ideas which strongly influenced Adorno--are culled from his study on the baroque Trauerspiel and from his later essays.) These theories are compared with respect to such themes as the historical development of the essay, its dominant aesthetic and philosophical functions (with particular regard to whether the essay is "systematic" or "fragmentary" in nature), and the role of the subject in the act of cognition which is embodied in the essay form. Each theory reflects its author's particular version of Marxist dialectics, his distinct view of the interrelations between aesthetics, cognition, and social reality. Thus, for example, the young Lukacs sees the modern essay as an alienated, fragmentary form which strives for an ideal "system" (this ideal being exemplified by the unity and "immediacy" of Plato's essay-dialogues). The nostalgic longing of Soul and Form reappears in the totalizing Marxism of Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness (1923). For Adorno, by contrast, the essay registers a utopian protest against such totalizing systems. Adorno considers the essay to be the formal enactment of "negative dialectics" (as he named his philosophy); fragmentation is its basic principle.;Whereas Adorno's theory is contrasted to that of Lukacs, his practice of the essay is juxtaposed to Benjamin's experiments with the form. The now famous aesthetic dispute between Adorno and Benjamin of the thirties is re-examined in terms of the rhetorical strategies evidenced in their critical writings. It is argued that Benjamin was more attentive than Adorno to the cognitive responses of readers, and that in some ways his essays came closer to satisfying the normative aims of "negative dialectics" than did the essays of Adorno himself.;Each of these theories is a "cognitive utopia," a kind of philosophical wish-fulfillment, in that each theorist projects his own ideal Essay as the solution to the most basic problems of modern culture and society. While none of these theories gives an entirely satisfactory historical account of the essay genre, they still serve as interpretive master-keys to the essays of the theorists themselves.;Or perhaps as clues for a theory of the modern critical essay. Whatever their differences, these thinkers are alike in seeing the essay as a function of the cognitive experience of a writing subject. Thus they belong to a familiar anthropology of discourse which in recent years has been sharply challenged by "poststructuralist" theories. The poststructuralists--among them Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Barthes--reject the notion of a controlling subject of discourse in favor of the "free play" of the language of the text. The concluding chapter imagines a confrontation between Marxist utopias of cognition and poststructuralist utopias of language--two alternative poetics for the modern critical essay.