The creators of West Side Story were liberal artists who updated Romeo and Juliet amidst youth gangs and racism, and each felt the sting of discrimination because they were Jewish and gay, but neither good intentions nor their own status as ‘Others’ in American society allowed them to realize fully the class advantages they had over the Puerto Rican minorities depicted in their show. Through consideration of Theodor Adorno’s concept of ‘Culture Industry,’ what one learns about Bernstein from his 1970 meeting with the Black Panthers immortalized as ‘Radical Chic’ by Tom Wolfe, Teju Cole’s concept of the ‘White Savior Industrial Complex,’ how the show has been cast, and other lenses, the author demonstrates how West Side Story can be described as insensitive in areas of class, the politics of colour, and race. The chapter also considers Bernstein’s cultural appropriation of African American and Latinx tropes in his music.

The current conception of political literature is still influenced, to a significant extent, by the commitment debate between Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács, in which the political power of the literary imagination rests either in its abstract freedom from political realities (Adorno), or in its close fidelity to them (Lukács).

This essay suggests that an understanding of James Kelman’s writing, as a singular form of political literature, requires us to move beyond this opposition. In blending a writing that is deeply committed to locality and to place with a writing affiliated to the abstractions of Kafka and Beckett, Kelman’s work suggests new ways of imagining the terms in which the mind is both free from and bound to its determining conditions. The essay offers a reading of Kelman’s later novels – Translated Accounts, You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free and pre-eminently Kiron Smith, boy – in order to develop an account of a political imagination that is attuned to the particular cleaving that Kelman performs, between freedom and servitude, between place and the dismantling of place.

This essay offers a speculative account of a third wave of Beckett criticism, emerging at the turn of the current century, one which is dedicated to the articulation of a Beckettian literary politics.

The first two waves of Beckett criticism, the essay suggests, despite their manifest differences, shared a sense that Beckett was in some fundamental sense an apolitical writer. The first wave sees his work as invested in a universal condition, which is resistant to any form of political particularity. The second tended to see his writing as a deconstructive endeavour, one which reveals not an essential human condition, but the groundless of all forms of being.

Both of these waves of criticism, the essay argues, tend to overlook a central dynamic in Beckett’s writing, in which a rejection of forms of reference coincides with a longing, however residual, for forms of political community. The urge towards solitude in Beckett is countered by an equally strong urge towards company, towards shared life. To begin to articulate a Beckettian politics, as part of a third wave of Beckett criticism, it is necessary to develop a critical language that can account at once for Beckett’s negativity – his refusal of political commitments – and for his persistent attachment to the word that he seems to disavow.

This essay considers the ways in which Sebald’s engagement with his literary predecessors expresses his aim, explored in all his major books from Nach der Natur (After Nature, 1988) to Austerlitz (2001), of understanding the historically constructed condition of ‘culture’. Beyond the impact of specific individuals on his work – from Thomas Browne to Joseph Conrad, from Thomas Bernhard to Vladimir Nabokov – the essay considers why the idea of a literary tradition was so important to Sebald’s creative project, and how his intertextual engagement with this tradition helped shape the very terms of his writing. What does it mean, we can ask of Sebald with Susan Sontag, to be ‘a European at the end of European civilization’?

According to Rita Felski, literary studies have for too long been restricted to what Paul Ricoeur famously called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” It should now return to the text itself as a locus not only of power, interest, and domination, but of literary value, inviting engagement intellectually, emotionally, and imaginatively. Via a reading of Wittgenstein’s work on aesthetics, including his conception of aspect-perception, this chapter reflects on Felski’s proposal, arguing that its opposition between suspicion and humanism might be too simple. While Wittgenstein offers a powerful defense of a humanist view according to which a literary text encourages responsiveness to expressive meaning, it is argued that his view can be extended to include meaning constituted in various historical contexts as well. As a result, the text, as Adorno and Said claim, can never escape its dual determination as both worldly and inherently meaningful.

This chapter moves through three clear stages. First, the initial sections highlight some of the ways that Wittgenstein has been misread by thinkers working in the tradition of continental philosophy and critical theory (including Badiou, Deleuze, and Marcuse); and, exposing some of these misreadings, it makes the case for grasping Wittgenstein not simply a modernist philosopher, but, more specifically, as an exponent of (what the chapter terms) philosophical modernism. Second, the chapter tarries with a number of Wittgenstein’s controversial remarks on the atomic bomb and (what he calls) the “apocalyptic view of the world,” and it brings these remarks into dialogue with the work of a number of other literary and philosophical figures, including Gertrude Stein, Günther Anders, and Theodor Adorno. Third, and finally, although Wittgenstein’s remarks on apocalypse appear in his private, postwar notebooks, they nevertheless provide us with a crucial link to his later philosophy, specifically Philosophical Investigations and this is what I turn to in the last sections of the chapter. In the Investigations, it is not simply the language of the book that we might describe as apocalyptic, but also, and more importantly, the fundamental conception of philosophy that we find therein. This returns us to the view of philosophical modernism previously outlined.

Entering into Anton Webern’s twelve-tone music and its complex reception history is like entering into a combat with the Hydra: cleave off one head of the Webern myth, and two more grow in its place. Taking a step back from the embattled scenes of the past in search of a broader vantage point, this chapter argues that the crux in understanding late Webern lies in understanding that the competing, often contradictory images of the composer that have emerged pose no real contradictions after all. Instead, in the same way that the Hydra’s separate heads are essentially connected entities, these different images are best understood as mediated with one another on a deeper level, representing different aspects of one and the same aesthetic concern: musical lyricism.

Alban Berg’s serial works (c. 1925–35) show his ability to use the twelve-tone method of composition as a form of exegesis for his personal, intellectual, and musical heritage in musical narratives suffused with apparent contradictions. In so doing, Berg combined what has been understood as antithetical ideas in an overarching system that brings together his modernistic aesthetics and the art of the past through textures in which twelve-tone serialism and tonality are interwoven. Problematising scholarship that attempts to understand Berg’s music based on Schoenberg’s compositional models, I argue that Berg followed the lead of Fritz Heinrich Klein and Theodor Adorno and embraced contradiction as a ‘category of thought’ in his compositional process. Berg’s approach is evident from the construction of the series to compositions such as the Violin Concerto (1935), which contains a web of musical and extra-musical significations that continues to challenge existing analytical models.

The history of literature has long been viewed in its relationship to politics. For much of the twentieth century, we were schooled to find the politics of literature not in its acknowledged commitments but as lying deep within its unconsciously ideological structures and forms. The Introduction to the volume, as well as offering succinct summaries of the eighteen essays that make it up, calls for attending to literature’s political surfaces: to recognise that twentieth-century authors wrote in direct response to political movements, ideas, and events, that many were activists for or against them, and that literature and politics over the twentieth century coincided, overlapped, and clashed. Taking its cue from Toni Morrison’s unapologetic mixing of commitment and literature in her 1973 Foreword to Sula, the Introduction argues that several works by twentieth-century individuals were political in specific, open, and direct ways. This is of course not to say that these writers did not question literature’s relationship to politics, nor that they didn’t quiz literature’s ability to effect politics.

This chapter engages various philosophical attempts to define and delimit the essay, and to use the form to do a kind of philosophy that became increasingly urgent in the shadow of twentieth-century atrocities. The author considers theories of the essay by Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Walter Pater, and others.

Chapter 6 shows The Tempest dispersing instances of the aesthetic-utopian and instrumental political power throughout until a remarkable ending imposes a tragicomic aesthetic over all other materials in the play. In describing the disenchanted early modern world with fantasies of enchantment, in representing instrumental reason as magical manipulation of natural spirits, and in manifesting the power of aesthetic representations to heal, restore, and regenerate a fallen humanity, the play is one of Shakespeare’s consummate examples of the aesthetic-utopian. At the center of the play is the master–slave pair Prospero and Caliban. Each is a deposed sovereign in a narrative of betrayal, forming the center of two (fragmentary) dramas that are each an essential part of the larger play. And in the play’s implied after-time, both are restored to their former polities as sovereigns. And both see something of the foolishness of the political struggles in which they had lived so long. As such, they are important parts of the aesthetic-utopian in the play’s conclusion, which does not so much defeat the political as declare it irrelevant to the play’s ultimate aesthetic-utopian vision.

“The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair,” wrote Theodor Adorno in 1946–47, “is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption … Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.”1

Alexis de Tocqueville is often described as a critic of American culture and modern democracy. Yet, as Alan Levine argues, there is an important difference between Tocqueville’s friendly criticisms of parts of American culture he finds wanting and other ideological critiques by “anti-American” thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and the Frankfurt School. Several factors separate Tocqueville from this European tradition of “Anti-Americanism.” Tocqueville’s criticisms are balanced by an appreciation of the virtues of American democracy and a recognition that these defects are hardly unique to America. His criticisms also take their root in empirical considerations of the complexities of American culture. Although the Frankfurt School and other influential critics often claim Tocqueville as inspiration for their complaints about mass society, they are ideologically motivated, ignore America’s redeeming virtues, and fault America uniquely for widely shared flaws of modernity.

When read in light of Adorno’s “preponderance of the object,” The Tempest can be seen as bearing the marks of “primitive accumulation” in ways that can be made to challenge the ecologically catastrophic present. The unusual physical presence of wood in Shakespeare’s play in performance – especially given the play’s lavish display of suffering – opens it to serving as a critique of the reduction of the nonhuman world to mere “raw material” for human use, through which the subordination of some humans to others is also effected. In its physical form wood can be interruptive. Attentiveness to its refusal to reduce to human purposes in the excess of its seeming quiddity can open viewers to a “change of perspective” that, in turn, might lead to enhanced struggle for transformed conditions of existence – without the domination property relations establish – for humans and nonhumans alike: the goal of a properly Marxist ecology.

This chapter expands on Theodor Adorno’s account of the enigma in Aesthetic Theory in order to scrutinise further his paradox between the critical impulse and literature that does not ‘extinguish [its] enigmaticalness’. I explore the implications of this tension in relation to J. H. Prynne’s collection Acrylic Tips (2002), and its resistances towards signification. The difficulty of interpretation, I emphasise, is not coterminous with incomprehensibility. Subsequently, I analyse enigmatical poetics in examples of both mainstream and ‘innovative’ writing. Don Paterson’s ‘The Sea at Brighton’ from Landing Light (2003) contains moments of lyrical sublimity, but then pulls back from the ‘remainder’, distrusting any notion of ‘difficult’ poetry. In contrast, Geraldine Monk’s collection Ghosts & Other Sonnets(2008) emphasises the linguistic ‘clowning’ that Adorno laments will appear to some uninitiated readers of modern art as merely ridiculous verbiage.

The Mahler Revival of the early 1960s, a movement galvanized by the centenary of the composer’s birth, bears scrutiny for the diverse ways in which the renewed interest shaped the reception of his music. The term “revival” perhaps overstates the case, as Mahler’s name was by no means unknown in the first half of the 1900s: performances of his music occurred, albeit infrequently; most works had been recorded; editions had been published and were still available; and the composer had been the subject of several biographies. The new elements, surveyed here, include an unprecedented intensity of activity in three specific areas: recordings, particularly full cycles, first by Bernstein but soon followed by Solti, Karajan, Haitink, Inbal, Chailly, and others; lectures and published research, here again spearheaded by a clear leader, Adorno, but with a substantial body of secondary (and far less notorious) figures; and new editions, most importantly, the Gesamtausgabe begun in 1959.

Richard Strauss's late operatic and instrumental works exemplify a positive meaning of lateness in the context of creative production: not to be "late" in an artistic or stylistic sense, but rather a fulfillment and purification of both compositional technique and content. Discussing Strauss's lateness in the larger context of the musical and philosophical debate (considering the positions of Gottfried Benn, Theodor Adorno, and Edward Said, as well as Auguste Rodin's ideas on antiquity), the author offers a new perspective in joining that intense period of the composer with James Hillman's consideration of aging as the culmination of a creative life. Thus, Strauss's last period exemplifies what the American psychologist calls the "force of character."

This essay argues that the niche occupied by contemporary Irish poetry in global Anglophone literature is a function of its formal conservatism and resistance to theoretical reflection. Irish poetry offers a moderate and palatable alternative to poetic work that works in a more thoroughgoing fashion through the violence of the present. Its conservative formalism is a hedge against confronting form with the conditions poetry must engage with. Accordingly, much of recent Irish poetry paradoxically furnishes a convenient and consumable commodity form even where it seems to offer an alternative to the economic and ecological spectacle of global transformations. But a number of poets have found formally innovative ways to accommodate both the political violence of the Troubles and the depredations of neoliberalism in Ireland while at the same time drawing on the long history of Irish resistance to such effects of colonialism and capitalism.