Samir Gandesha, Johan H. Hartle and Stefano Marino have published a new edited volume, The “Aging” of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Fifty Years Later, with Mimesis International.

If 2019 was an “Adornian year” because of the 50th anniversary of the untimely death of Theodor W. Adorno in August 1969, also 2020 has been an “Adornian year” because of the 50th anniversary of the posthumous publication of Adorno’s great but unfinished masterpiece Aesthetic Theory, first published in 1970. Adorno’s intellectual legacy is still alive today and indeed important for the conceptual tools as it still provides to develop a critical, active and negative (instead than acritical, passive and affirmative) relationship with the real. In the vast and complex corpus of Adorno’s entire philosophical oeuvre, his aesthetic theory deserves an especially close and renewed attention today for the variety of intellectual provocations that are still richly offered to us in order to critically understand our age.

Find out more about the book here: http://mimesisinternational.com/the-aging-of-adornos…/

Eleni Philippou (Oxford) has shared with us news of the upcoming book launch for her recently published monograph, Speaking Politically: Adorno and Postcolonial Fiction (Routledge).

Full Details on the launch are available here: https://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/discussion-group-book-launch-speaking-politically-adorno-and-postcolonial-fiction.

Eleni Philippou (Oxford)
Daniele Nunziata (Oxford)
Monday, May 17, 2021 – 13:00 to 14:00
Livestreamed via Microsoft Teams on 17 May

Join Dr Eleni Philippou in conversation with Dr Daniele Nunziata to discuss her monograph, Speaking Politically: Adorno and Postcolonial Fiction. In this monograph Theodor Adorno’s philosophy engages with postcolonial texts and authors that emerge out of situations of political extremity – apartheid South Africa, war-torn Sri Lanka, Pinochet’s dictatorship, and the Greek military junta. This book is ground-breaking in two key ways: first, it argues that Adorno can speak to texts with which he is not historically associated; and second, it uses Adorno’s theory to unlock the liberatory potential of authors or novels traditionally understood to be “apolitical”. While addressing Adorno’s uneven critical response and dissemination in the Anglophone literary world, the book also showcases Adorno’s unique reading of the literary text both in terms of its innate historical content and formal aesthetic attributes. Such a reading refuses to read postcolonial texts exclusively as political documents, a problematic (but changing) tendency within postcolonial studies. In short, the book operates as a two-way conversation asking: “What can Adorno’s concepts give to certain literary texts?” but also reciprocally, “What can those texts give to our conventional understanding of Adorno and his applicability?” This book is an act of rethinking the literary in Adornian terms, and rethinking Adorno through the literary.

The book can be purchased here: https://www.routledge.com/Speaking-Politically-Adorno-and-Postcolonial-Fiction/Philippou/p/book/9780367437930

Bios: Dr Eleni Philippou is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at OCCT and the Principal Investigator of the Prismatic Jane Eyre Schools project. Beyond her key research interests in postcolonial and world literature, she is also interested in critical theory, comparative literature, and translation studies. She is an award-winning poet, with a number of poems published in both British and international anthologies and journals.

Dr Daniele Nunziata is a Lecturer in English Literature at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. His research on postcolonial literature has been published in numerous journals (including PMLA and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing) and in the Columbia University Press series, Studies in World Literature. He is a contributor to Writers Make Worlds.