Activity: External talk or presentation › Oral presentation
Description
This paper will return to Theodor Adorno’s understanding of a ‘committed’ literature and why he rejected (or had to reject) that notion of political engagement in favour of an understanding of what was posited as a more potent ‘autonomy’. Why the hostility between these terms? Is the castigation of a literature which sets out to be ‘committed’ of interest only as a historical moment in the reception of modernism or could it be reconfigured for contemporary work? In particular, is Adorno of any use in understanding the ‘turn to politics’ within great swathes of both popular and ‘literary’ culture over the last few years? The paper will engage with Adorno’s aesthetic theory to understand the meanings of ‘autonomy’ and the art-work it imagines. But it will do so as a way of contributing to a literary-historical project to read ‘dystopia’ as a genre. What both threads share will be brought together in the paper’s conclusion, which will bring to a focus the difficulties of either identifying or doing away with questions of aesthetic ‘value’ in work on the novel.
Period
Dec 2020
Held at
Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics