Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Adorno Now

2001; Indiana University Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/vic.2001.44.1.33

1527-2052

Joseph Litvak,

South Asian Cinema and Culture

It's a bit of a stretch, in the context of this forum, to choose Theodor Adorno's Notes to Literature. The two volumes of Shierry Weber Nicholsen's translation were published in 1991 and 1992 respectively--just barely fitting into the category of works published in the last five or ten years. While the most recent of the essays collected in these two volumes date from the sixties, some, qualifying as juvenilia, were written as long ago as the early thirties. Indeed, the only obviously Victorian piece in the collection, Adorno's short essay on The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), first appeared in 1931. So we're clearly not talking hot off the presses. Yet it's this very antiquity, along with the outsider's or exile's relation to Anglo-American literature and culture, that constitutes much of Adorno's appeal for me. Or rather, Adorno appeals to me because he's taught me the unsettling power of the primitive, the outmoded, the awkwardly old-world. Coming before our own critical moment, as he comes to Victorian and English writing from someplace else, Adorno exerts the uncanny fascination of the revenant: of the prehistoric that returns to haunt the modern, not least by threatening to surpass it.