ENGL 28
Adorno's Aesthetic Theory Winter 2023

This is not the current course catalog

Theodor Adorno was one of the twentieth century’s most challenging thinkers-a German Jewish refugee who loathed the United States but ended up in Los Angeles, who had no hope for Germany but returned there after the war. His intellectual contributions are too extensive to list: He produced groundbreaking work in philosophy, musicology, literary criticism, sociology, and political theory. The last book he ever wrote was called Aesthetic Theory and summed up a lifetime of thinking about what had happened to art in the twentieth century. Its questions will be our questions: What is the responsibility of art in the face of suffering? What kind of art is possible in a world reduced to rubble? Is it possible to produce a form of art that does not dominate others, that cannot be put in the service of their domination? A word about the course’s format: Aesthetic Theory is one of those rare books that can change the way you think about nearly everything. You can almost feel your brain shifting into a higher gear as you read it. It is also almost impossible to read on your own. So we will be reading Adorno together in class, actually going through the book sentence by sentence. We will meet every weekday for ninety minutes or two hours.