Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Thoughts beside Themselves
- 1 Negative Dialectic as Fate
- 2 Weighty Objects
- 3 Adorno, Marx, Materialism
- 4 Leaving Home
- 5 Is Experience Still in Crisis? Reflections on a Frankfurt School Lament
- 6 Mephistopheles in Hollywood
- 7 Right Listening and a New Type of Human Being
- 8 Authenticity and Failure in Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music
- 9 Dissonant Works and the Listening Public
- 10 Adorno, Heidegger, and the Meaning of Music
- 11 The Critical Theory of Society as Reflexive Sociology
- 12 Genealogy and Critique
- 13 Adorno’s Negative Moral Philosophy
- 14 Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today
- 15 Adorno’s Tom Sawyer Opera Singspiel
- Select Bibliography
- Index
6 - Mephistopheles in Hollywood
Adorno, Mann, and Schoenberg
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Thoughts beside Themselves
- 1 Negative Dialectic as Fate
- 2 Weighty Objects
- 3 Adorno, Marx, Materialism
- 4 Leaving Home
- 5 Is Experience Still in Crisis? Reflections on a Frankfurt School Lament
- 6 Mephistopheles in Hollywood
- 7 Right Listening and a New Type of Human Being
- 8 Authenticity and Failure in Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music
- 9 Dissonant Works and the Listening Public
- 10 Adorno, Heidegger, and the Meaning of Music
- 11 The Critical Theory of Society as Reflexive Sociology
- 12 Genealogy and Critique
- 13 Adorno’s Negative Moral Philosophy
- 14 Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today
- 15 Adorno’s Tom Sawyer Opera Singspiel
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
At the end of 1947, Dialectic of Enlightenment was published by Querido Verlag. Written with Max Horkheimer, the book was the most important product of Theodor Adorno's exile in the United States. While its significance for Adorno's subsequent work has long been recognized, less attention has been paid to its relationship to two other works, both of which appeared at about the same time: Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and Arnold Schoenberg's Survivor from Warsaw. The three share a good deal more than their common birthdate. Brought together, they form a triptych in which each offers a different perspective on the themes addressed by the others. Produced by refugees from Hitler's Germany, all three were responses to the diabolical force that had driven their creators into exile; in differing ways, all three explored the intertwining of enlightenment and myth, reason and barbarism, civilization and cruelty; and all three were produced by men who knew one another and lived within a few miles of each another, just outside Hollywood.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Adorno , pp. 148 - 180Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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