Notes to Literature is a collection of the great social theorist Theodor W. Adorno's essays on such writers as Mann, Bloch, Hölderlin, Siegfried Kracauer, Goethe, Benjamin, and Stefan George. It also includes his reflections on a variety of subjects, such as literary titles, the physical qualities of books, political commitment in literature, the light-hearted and the serious in art, and the use of foreign words in writing. This edition presents this classic work in full in a single volume, with a new introduction by Paul Kottman.
Paul Kottman (PhD, Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley; Habilitation, Aesthetics, Scientifica Nazionale, Italy) is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, with affiliation in Philosophy, at the New School. He is the author of Disinheriting the Globe: Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare (Hopkins, 2009), A Politics of the Scene (Stanford, 2008), and Love as Human Freedom (Stanford, forthcoming), the editor of Philosophers on Shakespeare (Stanford, 2009) and The Insistence of Art: Aesthetic Philosophy and Early Modernity (Fordham, 2017), and the translator of Cavarero: For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford, 2005). He is also the editor of the series Square One: First-Order Questions in the Humanities (Stanford).