Art is not only autonomous, following its own law, different from nonaesthetic reason, but sovereign: it subverts the rule of reason.In this book Christoph Menke attempts to explain art's sovereign power to subvert reason without falling ...

"The Spanish original, 'La rebelión de las masas,' was published by 1930; this translation, authorized by Sr. Ortega y Gasset, remains anonymous at the translator's request." Contents: 1. The Coming of the Masses 2. The Rise of the Historical Level 3. The Height of the Times 4. The Increase of Life 5. A Statistical Fact 6. The Dissection of the Mass-Man Begins 7. Noble Life and Common Life, or Effort and Inertia 8. Why the Masses Intervene in Everything, and Why (...) Their Intervention is Solely by Violence 9. The Primitive and the Technical 10. Primitivism and History 11. The Self-Satisfied Age 12. The Barbarism of “Specialisation” 13. The Greatest Danger, the State 14. Who Rules the World 15. We Arrive at the Real Question. (shrink)

"One of the most comprehensive and intelligent postmodern critics of art and literature, Huyssen collects here a series of his essays on pomo... " —Village Voice Literary Supplement "... his work remains alert to the problematic relationship obtaining between marxisms and poststructuralisms." —American Literary History "... challenging and astute." —World Literature Today "Huyssen's level-headed account of this controversial constellation of critical voices brings welcome clarification to today's murky haze of cultural discussion and proves definitively that commentary from the tradition of (...) the German Left has an indispensable role to play in contemporary criticism." —The German Quarterly "... we will certainly have, after reading this book, a deeper understanding of the forces that have led up to the present and of the possibilities still open to us." —Critical Texts "... a rich, multifaceted study." —The Year's Work in English Studies Huyssen argues that postmodernism cannot be regarded as a radical break with the past, as it is deeply indebted to that other trend within the culture of modernity—the historical avant-garde. (shrink)

Adorno's first musical monograph, his book on Wagner, represents his most consistent effort to apply commodity analysis to one of the seminal oeuvres of cultural modernity. The notion of commodity character and the associated concept of phantasmagoria are to fulfil the function of mediation between the more narrowly conceived technical analysis of Wagner's music and the disclosure of its aesthetic-social substance, providing the ultimate social ground for their unity. This project, however, fails. Commodity analysis proves to be radically vague, incapable (...) of disclosing the historical specificity of the music dramas either in respect of the tradition of Vienna classicism, or the ensuing development of aesthetic modernism. At the same time its application is burdened by contradictions. Ultimately, Adorno's critical interpretation relapses into a form of ideology critique the simplifications of which he originally attempted to overcome. (shrink)