> The book seems a ready-made classroom text for the growing Adorno
> industry. Out of the scores of secondary-sources cited, nearly all come
> from the last two decades.
> That growth is astounding...." etc.
> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/arts/music/14CONN.html
It's not really an industry -- more like a long-running, um, conspiracy. [Insert mad-scientist cackle.]
> I don't know about Rothstein's conclusion though: "...There is even
> something heroic about his philosophical enterprise. But there is also
> something perverse. For while with one hand he caresses the 19th- and
> 20th-century art-music tradition, mourning its marginality and
> meticulously teasing out its meanings, with the other hand he tries,
> again and again, to sweep away the contentious, striving, bourgeois
> world that gave it birth." Any comments? Anybody?
Sounds like yet another attempt to turn Adorno into a depoliticized post-structuralist. Adorno was, first and foremost, a Marxist, who insisted that the meanings of works of art are indelibly stamped with the vectors of class struggle (only not in the simplistic fashion of Work A = socialism and Work B = fascism).
-- Dennis