Notes to Literature

Notes to Literature is a collection of the great social theorist Theodor W. Adorno’s essays on such writers as Mann, Bloch, Holderlin, 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.

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), an eminent critic, philosopher, and social theorist, was one of the major intellectual voices of the twentieth century and a leading member of the Frankfurt School. His many classic works include Minima Moralia, The Philosophy of New Music, Critical Models, Aesthetic Theory, Negative Dialectics, and, with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Rolf Tiedemann (1932–2018) was the editor of Adorno’s complete works.

Shierry Weber Nicholsen is a practicing psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in Seattle. She is the author of Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno's Aesthetics (1997) and the translator of a number of books by Adorno, including Hegel: Three Studies (1994); Habermas, including Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (2001); and other members of the Frankfurt School.

Paul Kottman is associate professor of comparative literature and chair of liberal studies at the New School. His books include Disinheriting the Globe: Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare (2009).