e99 Online Shopping Mall
Help | |
Home - Philosophers - Adorno Theodor W (Books) |
  | 1-20 of 99 | Next 20 |
click price to see details click image to enlarge click link to go to the store
1. Correspondence: 1943-1955 by Theodor W. Adorno, Thomas Mann | |
Hardcover: 144
Pages
(2006-12-11)
list price: US$35.95 -- used & new: US$26.36 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0745632009 Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description The ensuing correspondence between the two men documents a rare encounter of creative tension between literary tradition and aesthetic modernism which would be sustained right up until the novelists death in 1955. In the letters, Thomas Mann openly acknowledged his fascinated reading of Adornos Minima Moralia and commented in detail on the Essay on Wagner, which he was as eager to read as the one in the Book of Revelation consumes a book which tastes as sweet as honey. Adorno in turn offered detailed observations upon and frequently enthusiastic commendations of Manns later writings, such as The Holy Sinner, The Betrayed One and The Confessions of Felix Krull. Their correspondence also touches upon issues of great personal significance, notably the sensitive discussion of the problems of returning from exile to postwar Germany. The letters are extensively annotated and offer the reader detailed notes concerning the writings, events and personalities referred or alluded to in the correspondence. |
2. Theodor W. Adorno: An Introduction (Post-Contemporary Interventions) by Gerhard Schweppenhäuser | |
Paperback: 200
Pages
(2009-01-01)
list price: US$22.95 -- used & new: US$15.00 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0822344718 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description After providing a brief overview of Adorno’s life, Schweppenhäuser turns to the theorist’s core philosophical concepts, including post-Kantian critique, determinate negation, and the primacy of the object, as well as his view of the Enlightenment as a code for world domination, his diagnosis of modern mass culture as a program of social control, and his understanding of modernist aesthetics as a challenge to conceive an alternative politics. Along the way, Schweppenhäuser illuminates the works widely considered Adorno’s most important achievements: Minima Moralia, Dialectic of Enlightenment (co-authored with Horkheimer), and Negative Dialectics. Adorno wrote much of the first two of these during his years in California (1938–49), where he lived near Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, whom he assisted with the musical aesthetics at the center of Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus. Customer Reviews (1)
Rescuing What is Beyond Hope |
3. Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy by Theodor W. Adorno | |
Paperback: 188
Pages
(1996-08-15)
list price: US$20.00 -- used & new: US$14.95 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0226007693 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (3)
A dated classic
provocative and stimulating analysis of Mahler's music To introduce the subject let me start with an experience of myown, which is no doubt typical.My introduction to Mahler's music wasthrough the Ninth and Tenth symphonies, which is like starting a mountainclimb already at the top of the mountain.I was 22 and naturally quitebowled over.Imagine my chagrin then at hearing the Fourth for the firsttime -- what is this Haydnesque genre piece that ends with a naive song? How could it have been written by the same composer? As always, though,Mahler's music works on one's subconscious and a few days later I feltcompelled to listen again, and what a revelation this was!The firstmovement, in particular, is absolutely extraordinary.It starts with acurious repeated figure, four flutes in unison playing fifths plus a gracenote, accompanied by bells; this leads directly into the deceptivelyclassical-sounding main theme and reappears throughout the first movement(and also in the last) as a kind of magic talisman with multiple meanings. The main theme is followed by a striking sunny interlude in A, with basesrocking pizzicato in fifths, a scurrying violin figure, and violas trillinglike insects singing in a meadow.I had the impression of an adult andchild walking through a field on a summer day.There's a brief change tothe minor, then some high sustained notes in the flutes.These arerepeated more emphatically by high clarinets, heralding an ominous change,as if the bucolic scene were being overrun by scudding clouds.Things arenot what they seemed, and we don't know where we are!Somehow, we'vegotten lost in a forest inhabited by goblins, spooky though not actuallymenacing. There's a swirling sensation accompanied by dark intimations inthe bass, chromatic muted trumpets, and repeated sustained high chords inthe flutes; the effect is weirdly haunting.After a while a commotion in Cdevelops, drums crescendo, and then suddenly pure terror -- a high trumpetplaying fortissimo.By some process of pure magic, the music suddenlyrecovers its former equanimity and adult and child (who turn out to be oneand the same) find themselves back in the sunny meadow.What sublimeirony, and how true to human nature -- when we see something uncanny thatdisturbs us, we try to put it behind us, forget it.Mahler alone iscapable of evoking such feelings. Only a magician could have written theFourth, and Mahler's achievement here is just as great as in the verydifferent late works, not to mention the middle symphonies. I couldcite other personal examples, as could any Mahlerian.We might disagreeabout particulars, but each of us carries away something essential fromMahler's music and is enriched by it.And we are quite confident that theexperience is qualitatively the same from listener to listener. Adornoapproaches the subject of our response to Mahler's music and what it meansthrough his own experiences of it.But what a listener! It's as if a verylearned friend with a doctorate in Mahler stopped by to discuss the subjectover tea and ended up staying all week.A gifted writer and philosopher,as well as a professionally trained composer who studied with Berg, Adornodiscusses all the symphonies except the Tenth and is always interestingeven when you disagree with him.Musicological jargon is mostly avoided,although philosophical-rhetorical terms abound (he loves the word"aporia"). Two caveats.First, the treatment is vulnerable tothe charge of "over-intellectualization".One recalls Mahler'sreply to William Ritter, an early admirer:"... I find myself much lesscomplicated than your image of me, which could almost throw me into a stateof panic."It seems that we, and particularly Adorno, are thecomplicated ones.We project our feelings onto the music, which seems toinvite them to an extent that would surprise even the composer.Themystery of why this is so, and the multifariousness of Mahler, the capacityof his music to be offensive, highly questionable, fascinating, and sublimeall at the same time, form the subject of the book. Second, and moreseriously, he disparages Mahler's "ominous positivity" andthereby underestimates the Eighth Symphony at least (readers may agree thatthe finale of the Seventh is problematic; he does not discuss theextraordinary Tenth, which achieves a wholly serene, positive conclusion). But the positive in Mahler is an essential part of his dynamicdisequilibrium; without it, there would be no aporia and the music woulddegenerate into mere cynicism.Most of the symphonies follow a pattern --conflict, followed by attempted reconciliation and reconstruction.Thisprocess is entirely sincere, and if it fails even in Mahler's hands, it'sbecause he's attempting to do the impossible.Even in the Sixth, the most"tragic" and "despairing" of the symphonies, a goodperformance will reveal powerful updrafts.To deny the positive in Mahleris to chop him in two.That Adorno's book is nonetheless required readingis testimony to the value of his other observations. Who then is thisbook for?It is best for Mahlerians of long standing, those who are wellpast the first flush of discovery and have regained their musicalequilibrium so to speak, and who want to put Mahler in perspective, or evenjust "share" opinions with an uncommonly intelligent andsensitive critic.
the musical crevices and fault-linesare probed with Adorno |
4. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute by Susan Buck-Morss | |
Hardcover: 335
Pages
(1977-09)
list price: US$15.95 Isbn: 0029049105 Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
5. The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940 by Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin | |
Paperback: 400
Pages
(2001-12-07)
list price: US$36.50 -- used & new: US$32.85 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0674006895 Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description |
6. Notes to Literature, Volume 2 by Theodor W. Adorno | |
Paperback: 350
Pages
(1992-04-15)
list price: US$29.50 -- used & new: US$23.39 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0231069138 Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description --Susan Sontag |
7. Negative Dialectics by Theodor W. Adorno | |
Paperback: 448
Pages
(1990-04-05)
list price: US$58.95 -- used & new: US$39.99 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0415052211 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (6)
So when's that new translation due? Should we really wait?
Frankfurt School Genius
Masterpiece Theater
Read it at your own peril
Wait for new translation |
8. Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany by Theodor W. Adorno | |
Hardcover: 256
Pages
(2010-06-15)
list price: US$39.95 -- used & new: US$28.95 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0674036034 Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description Beginning in 1949, Theodor W. Adorno and other members of the reconstituted Frankfurt Institute for Social Research undertook a massive empirical study of German opinions about the legacies of the Nazis, applying and modifying techniques they had learned during their U.S. exile. They published their results in 1955 as a research monograph edited by Friedrich Pollock. The study's qualitative results are published here for the first time in English as Guilt and Defense, a psychoanalytically informed analysis of the rhetorical and conceptual mechanisms with which postwar Germans most often denied responsibility for the Nazi past. In their editorial introduction, Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin show howAdorno’s famous 1959 essay“The Meaning of Working through the Past,” is comprehensible only as a conclusion to his long-standing research and as a reaction to the debate it stirred; this volume also includes a critique by psychologist Peter R. Hoffstater as well as Adorno’s rejoinder. This previously little-known debate provides important new perspectives on postwar German political culture, on the dynamics of collective memory, and on Adorno’s intellectual legacies, which have contributed more to empirical social research than has been acknowledged. A companion volume, Group Experiment and Other Writings, will present the first book-length English translation of the Frankfurt Group's conceptual, methodological, and theoretical innovations in public opinion research. |
9. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (Routledge Classics) by Theodor W Adorno | |
Hardcover: 192
Pages
(2001-06-27)
list price: US$150.00 -- used & new: US$132.18 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0415255341 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (3)
Challenging
The Critique of Mass-Culture Par Excellence
Remarkably insightful, yet a little too big on modern art ... |
10. Dream Notes by Theodor W. Adorno | |
Hardcover: 128
Pages
(2007-03-09)
list price: US$17.95 -- used & new: US$13.00 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0745638309 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description Adorno was fascinated by his dreams and wrote them down throughout his life. He envisaged publishing a collection of them although in the event no more than a few appeared in his lifetime. Dream Notes offers a selection of Adornos writings on dreams that span the last twenty-five years of his life. Readers of Adorno who are accustomed to high-powered reflections on philosophy, music and culture may well find them disconcerting: they provide an amazingly frank and uninhibited account of his inner desires, guilt feelings and anxieties. Brothel scenes, torture and executions figure prominently. They are presented straightforwardly, at face value. No attempt is made to interpret them, to relate them to the events of his life, to psychoanalyse them, or to establish any connections with the principal themes of his philosophy. Are they fiction, autobiography or an attempt to capture a pre-rational, quasi-mythic state of consciousness? No clear answer can be given. Taken together they provide a highly consistent picture of a dimension of experience that is normally ignored, one that rounds out and deepens our knowledge of Adorno while retaining something of the enigmatic quality that energized his own thought. Customer Reviews (1)
One-of-a-kind collection |
11. Philosophy Of New Music by Theodor W. Adorno | |
Hardcover: 208
Pages
(2006-05-27)
list price: US$34.95 -- used & new: US$22.83 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0816636664 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (4)
philosophy of new music
Awesome, thanks!
Adorno at his absolute finest
It's Adorno, less than 5 stars would be Sacrilege |
12. Prisms (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) by Theodor W. Adorno | |
Paperback: 272
Pages
(1983-03-29)
list price: US$27.00 -- used & new: US$17.95 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0262510251 Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description |
13. Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius by Detlev Claussen | |
Paperback: 464
Pages
(2010-10-30)
list price: US$22.95 -- used & new: US$14.82 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0674057139 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description He was famously hostile to biography as a literary form. And yet this life of Adorno by one of his last students is far more than literary in its accomplishments, giving us our first clear look at how the man and his moment met to create “critical theory.” An intimate picture of the quintessential twentieth-century transatlantic intellectual, the book is also a window on the cultural ferment of Adorno’s day—and its ongoing importance in our own. The biography begins at the shining moment of the German bourgeoisie, in a world dominated by liberals willing to extend citizenship to refugees fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. Detlev Claussen follows Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903–1969) from his privileged life as a beloved prodigy to his intellectual coming of age in Weimar Germany and Vienna; from his exile during the Nazi years, first to England, then to the United States, to his emergence as the Adorno we know now in the perhaps not-so-unlikely setting of Los Angeles. There in 1943 with his collaborator Max Horkheimer, Adorno developed critical theory, whose key insight—that to be entertained is to give one’s consent—helped define the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century. In capturing the man in his complex relationships with some of the century’s finest minds—including, among others, Arnold Schoenberg, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann, Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Lukács, Hannah Arendt, and Bertolt Brecht—Claussen reveals how much we have yet to learn from Theodor Adorno, and how much his life can tell us about ourselves and our time. Customer Reviews (1)
Identifying the non-identical man |
14. Composing for the Films (Continuum Impacts) by Theodor W. Adorno, Hanns Eisler | |
Paperback: 176
Pages
(2007-12-11)
list price: US$24.95 -- used & new: US$8.86 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0826499023 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (2)
Belongs on every film music scholar's shelf
Adorno/Eisler |
15. Mimesis on the Move: Theodor W. Adorno's Concept of Imitation (New York University Ottendorfer Series, Neue Folge, Band 36) by Karla L. Schultz | |
Paperback: 204
Pages
(1991-01)
list price: US$48.95 -- used & new: US$48.95 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 3261042087 Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
16. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism) by Theodor W. Adorno | |
Paperback: 448
Pages
(2005-08-19)
list price: US$27.00 -- used & new: US$20.67 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 023113505X Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description Critical Models combines into a single volume two of Adorno's most important postwar works --Interventions: Nine Critical Models (1963) andCatchwords: Critical Models II (1969). Written after his return to Germany in 1949, the articles, essays, and radio talks included in this volume speak to the pressing political, cultural, and philosophical concerns of the postwar era. The pieces inCritical Models reflect the intellectually provocative as well as the practical Adorno as he addresses such issues as the dangers of ideological conformity, the fragility of democracy, educational reform, the influence of television and radio, and the aftermath of fascism. This new edition includes an introduction by Lydia Goehr, a renowned scholar in philosophy, aesthetic theory, and musicology. Goehr illuminates Adorno's ideas as well as the intellectual, historical, and critical contexts that shaped his postwar thinking. Customer Reviews (2)
A good jumping-off point for neophyte Adorno readers Critical Models is a collectionof essays, articles and radio talks, mostly from quite late in Adorno'scareer.I am neither a philosopher nor an academic, and would be the firstperson to admit that I'm not quite up to Adorno's more Hegelian moments. I'm just casting about for help in an increasingly bland, homogenised,uncritical cultural environment, and the best thing about Critical Modelsis that it's Adorno being unusually _helpful_. This is Adorno throwinghimself into the task of trying to build a post-war democracy in Germany,not Adorno the cantankerous emigre complaining that doors shut moreviolently than they used to.He urges the value of promoting the status ofteachers, of rooting out and criticising Nazi attitudes (who'd have thoughtthat they'd still be flourishing fifty years on).Adorno is seldom a veryapproachable writer, but here he's making the effort to communicate to amass audience, and to a relatively uneducated schmuck like me it's criticaldynamite.The spine of my copy of Negative Dialectics may remain foreveruncreased, but this one will be carried around.
Rolling in his grave as he's reviewed ........... This collection is ofessays written after Adorno returned to the Federal Republic of Germany inthe early 1950s. Because culturally Adorno was "very German" andindeed he resented the *Volkische* definition of Germanness imposed byHitler, Adorno delayed his escape, as the son of a Jewish father andCatholic mother, from Hitlerdom to a dangerous point. He resided briefly inEngland and somewhat longer in America. Strangely, he did not like Englandand (given the choice) preferred America, and specifically California, thelatter because of its climate. This collection makes it clear thatalthough Adorno was critical of many tendencies in America he was by nomeans knee-jerk in his criticism. Adorno enjoyed the very real democracy ofAmerican life and the very real empiricism of science as practisedhere...insofar as democracy and empiricism did not become, as a verydifferent sort of emigre might call it, a shtick, or a number: or, asAdorno would call it, fetishized or reified. But it is clear from theseessays that Adorno would be very critical of changes in America that haveoccured since my generation, that of the immediate post-war Baby Boom, hastaken over the shop. Adorno's work on Fascist tendencies in California, forexample, located Fascism in our hearts and at our dinner tables. Thesetendencies are denied in ceremonies (such as the commemoration, last week,of the bombing in Oklahoma City) which are structured by press and lawyersin a way that fully denies anything like a spontaneous response. Onenaturally wonders why it is that people at these commemorations, whichmemorialize real pain that should never be repeated, have to act in suchstructured fashions, and it was the structuring of Timothy McVeigh's lifeby similar tendencies that caused him, in all probability, to bomb theMurragh building. It was irresponsible to decry social research thatlocated Fascist and authoritarian tendencies so close to home and to expectno incidents such as the bombing of the Oklahoma City building. Adorno'swork is a reminder to examine our own environment for barbarism, andAmericans who have worked on issues of domestic abuse are in his tradition,even if they would actually find the guy irritating, arrogant andconceited...all of which he was. Some of the book does require, becauseof Adorno's arrogance, a knowledge of German philosophy, which is not alaugh a minute by any means. The essay "On Subject and Object",for example, may be completely opaque, even to, and especially to, the"educated" reader if her education is in the typical Americanuniversity. That's because what we mean by the subject may be divergentfrom what Ted meant, a difference expressed by our own"catchphrase", "that's subjective." "That'ssubjective" means in ordinary usage that "that" can bedismissed, and despite the (laudable) place that mere listening plays inour life, "that's subjective" forecloses listening. Adorno writesfrom a tradition in which subjectivity is not a sink and instead is asource of value. The surprising end of "on subject and object"is one in which the mere subject acquires value precisely by being removedfrom a place of origin: we realize, in the general murk of Adorno's style,that the very reason why we exhibit a false humility about our ownsubjectivity is that we are delivered a false story about our origins as"the first man", which exalts the subjectivity of a mythicalAdam, and makes our own second-hand.Adorno makes the common sense pointthat given our initial resources (which are inferior, because lessspecialized, than those of other large mammals) "the first man"was probably the group, in which the "subjectivity" of eachmember had to be (paradoxically enough) treasured because it was a groupresource. The experience of reading the more difficult essays is one ofstruggle, and reward, in which one realizes that one's mere failure tocomprehend is only in part a product of ignorance: it is one of dawn. Thisis in contrast to reading the typical American scholarly essay in which thevery lack of participation and struggle...and the airy dismissal ofimportant questions as marginalia, drives questions to the zone of thesubconscious. That is, Adorno is outside of the tradition which recastand rephrased problems into such a shape that they could be solved...thattheir solution was implied by their clear phrasing. Mathematics is anexample of this. At its best (and Adorno conceded this in many ways) thistradition is a source of both power and democracy. At its worst,however, and especially as applied to Adorno's own field of socialresearch, this tradition makes people into objects precisely because it hasto ignore the philosopher's tendency to delay, by questioning everything.The most obscene consequence of this is the political poll and its unstatedinfluence on our elections. Like Adorno's longer works but moreaccessibly, Critical Models rewards reading, and rereading: the verydensity of his style provides, in terms that would make the guy shudder,good value for the dollar...precisely because, as ... Read more |
17. <i>Group Experiment</i> and Other Writings: The Frankfurt School on Public Opinion in Postwar Germany by Friedrich Pollock, Theodor W. Adorno | |
Hardcover: 200
Pages
(2011-02-15)
list price: US$49.95 -- used & new: US$33.71 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0674048466 Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description During the occupation of West Germany after the Second World War, the American authorities commissioned polls to assess the values and opinions of ordinary Germans. They concluded that the fascist attitudes of the Nazi era had weakened to a large degree. Theodor W. Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues, who returned in 1949 from the United States, were skeptical. They held that standardized polling was an inadequate and superficial method for exploring such questions. In their view, public opinion is not simply an aggregate of individually held opinions, but is fundamentally a public concept, formed through interaction in conversations and with prevailing attitudes and ideas “in the air.” In Group Experiment, edited by Friedrich Pollock, they published their findings on their group discussion experiments that delved deeper into the process of opinion formation. Andrew J. Perrin and Jeffrey K. Olick make a case that these experiments are an important missing link in the ontology and methodology of current social-science survey research. |
18. Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik : Fragmente und Texte (Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung I, Fragment gebliebene Schriften / Theodor W. Adorno) (German Edition) by Theodor W Adorno | |
Hardcover: 387
Pages
(1993)
Isbn: 351858166X Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
19. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) by Theodor W. Adorno | |
Paperback: 256
Pages
(1984-10-18)
list price: US$11.95 Isbn: 0262510308 Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description |
20. Musikalische Schriften I-[VI] (Gesammelte Schriften / Theodor W. Adorno) (German Edition) by Theodor W Adorno | |
Unknown Binding:
Pages
(1978)
Isbn: 3518074768 Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
  | 1-20 of 99 | Next 20 |