We look forward to the forthcoming Special Issue of New German Critique marking the 50th Anniversary of Aesthetic Theory. “Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory at Fifty” (NGC #143) is edited by Peter E. Gordon (Harvard University) and will feature essays by Eva Geulen, Max Pensky, Hent de Vries, Martin Jay, Sherry Lee, J. M. Bernstein, Ricardo Samaniego de la Fuente, and Mikko Immanen.

From New German Critique:

“It has been fifty years since Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory was first published in 1970. The work appeared at an historical moment when political tension on the left was at its height, and when the modernist approaches its author championed were being eclipsed by competing movements associated with the 1970s, such as pop art and postmodernism. The initial resistance to Adorno’s major work created a legacy of misunderstandings, and even today, a proper reckoning with Aesthetic Theory in all of its dialectical complexity remains an ongoing and collective effort. This special issue of New German Critique originated in a series of lectures on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory held at Harvard University during the spring of 2019.”

The current issue (#142, February 2021) also includes essays that will be of interest to Adorno scholars. http://ngc.arts.cornell.edu/current.html

A more fulsome description of the current issue from the journal:

“NGC #142 features a broad range of exciting essays on Adorno, Lessing, Kafka, interwar socialist literature, and the concept of Leitkultur. On Adorno: Lydia Goehr’s contribution explores Adorno’s references to J.S. Bach in order to illuminate Adorno’s “critical theory of possibility,” and Kylie Gilchrist’s essay examines whether and how Adorno could critique advanced capitalist societies for their dehumanizing tendencies while at the same time refusing to define the human. Andrea Gyenge argues that the figure of the mouth in Lessing’s famous study of Laocoön tests the limits of eighteenth-century neoclassicism. Marit Grøtta’s essay examines the intertextual archive of Kafka’s Der Verschollene, bringing into play the hitherto overlooked nature theater movement of the early twentieth century. On interwar socialist literature: Sabine Hake’s contribution studies the writings of the largely forgotten August Winnig, and Christoph Schaub’s article explores how the world literature of socialist internationalism was imagined and practiced in the aftermath of World War I. Finally, Jana Cattien’s article interrogates Leitkultur discourse in contemporary Germany, aiming to expose how Germany’s colonial legacy simultaneously underpins that discourse while remaining hidden from it.

Lydia Goehr’s “Did Bach Compose Musical Works? Thinking with Adorno through Paradigms of Possibility,” will be available online without charge through May 2021 from Duke University Press.