Overview

Essays by Adorno on art and cinema, available in English for the first time.   In Without Model, Theodor W. Adorno strikingly demonstrates the intellectual range for which he is known. Taking the premise of the title as his guiding principle, that artistic and philosophical thought must eschew preconceptions and instead adapt itself to its time, circumstances, and object, Adorno presents a series of essays reflecting on culture at different levels, from the details of individual products to the social conditions of their production. He shows his more nostalgic side in the childhood reminiscences of ‘Amorbach’, but also his acute sociocultural analysis on the central topic of the culture industry. He criticizes attempts to maintain tradition in music and visual art, arguing against a restorative approach by stressing the modernity and individuality of historical works in the context of their time. In all of these essays, available for the first time in English, Adorno displays the remarkable thinking of one both steeped in tradition and dedicated to seeing beyond it.  

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9781803092188

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Reviews

""Without Model is Adorno at his most relaxed, a sequence of short, sometimes fragmentary texts on aesthetics – a ‘Parva Aesthetica’ – assembled by the author in late life and published in 1967, two years before he died. . . . Adorno’s commitment to being without a ‘model’ – a Leitbild – is rooted in one of his most appealing dislikes, for the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. . . . the ‘small aesthetics’ in Without Model will defend ‘the zone that conformism seeks to proscribe as experimental’, which for Adorno, as ever, ‘is the last refuge of the possibility of aesthetic truth’."" * London Review of Books *

"""Without Model is Adorno at his most relaxed, a sequence of short, sometimes fragmentary texts on aesthetics – a ‘Parva Aesthetica’ – assembled by the author in late life and published in 1967, two years before he died. . . . Adorno’s commitment to being without a ‘model’ – a Leitbild – is rooted in one of his most appealing dislikes, for the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. . . . the ‘small aesthetics’ in Without Model will defend ‘the zone that conformism seeks to proscribe as experimental’, which for Adorno, as ever, ‘is the last refuge of the possibility of aesthetic truth’."" * London Review of Books *"

Author Information

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69) was the author of In Search of Wagner, Aesthetic Theory, and Negative Dialectics, among many other books. Wieland Hoban is a British composer who has translated several works from German, including Night Music, a collection of essays by Theodor W. Adorno.  

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