NOTES TO LITERATURE VOL.1

These 17 essays by an important European critic of the Frankfurt school deal with a broad range of topics: the essay form, the epic, the narrator in the contemporary novel, lyric poetry and society, surrealism, Beckett's Endgame , and various European authors (Balzac, Goethe, Proust, Valery, Bloch, Heine, etc.). The essays are generally pitched at a rather high level of abstraction and with a Marxist philosophical slant: the response of literature and individual artists to alienation in an industrial/capitalist society is a recurring concern. Though this is primarily a book for specialists and academic libraries, Adorno's thought and highly suggestive remarks are well worth the effort.