Aesthetics and Politics

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.

Autorentext
Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.**Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was a German poet, playwright, and theater director. An influential theater practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble-the post-war theater company operated by Brecht and his wife and long-time collaborator, the actress Helene Weigel-with its internationally acclaimed productions.A close associate of Brecht, Lukács, Benjamin, and Adorno (and exercising a formative influence on their work), Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) is perhaps one of the most influential scholars of Marxism. The Nazis' rise to power forced him to flee his native Germany in the thirties. Since his death, his works, such as The Principle of Hope and Atheism in Christianity, have continued to inspire engagement with the Marxist tradition.Georg Lukács (1885-1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the ideas of reification and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.Theodor Adorno was director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt from 1959 until his death in 1969. His works include In Search of Wagner; Aesthetic Theory; Negative Dialectics; and (with Max Horkheimer) Dialectic of Enlightenment and Towards a New Manifesto.Walter Benjamin* (1892-1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator and philosopher. He was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama.* In 1940, he was in Spain, fleeing the Nazis and en route to the United States, when Franco's government cancelled his visa. Expecting repatriation, he took his own life.

Zusammenfassung
An intense and lively debate on literature and art between thinkers who became some of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy and literature