Modernism and the Frankfurt School - (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture) by Tyrus Miller (Paperback)

About the Book

Tyrus Miller's book offers readers a focused introduction to the Frankfurt School's important attempts to relate the social, political, and philosophical conditions of modernity to innovations in twentieth-century art, literature, and culture.

Book Synopsis

Provides a single-volume introduction to the important connection of Frankfurt School thought and modernist culture
Tyrus Miller's book offers readers a focused introduction to the Frankfurt School's important attempts to relate the social, political, and philosophical conditions of modernity to innovations in twentieth-century art, literature, and culture. The book pursues this interaction of modernity and modernist aesthetics in a two-sided, dialectical approach. Not only, Miller suggests, can the Frankfurt School's penetrating critical analyses of the phenomena of modernity help us develop more nuanced, historically informed and contextually sensitive analyses of modernist culture; but also, modernist culture provides a field of problems, examples, and practices that intimately affected the formation of the Frankfurt School's theoretical ideas.
The individual chapters, which include detailed discussions of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse as well as a survey of later Frankfurt School influenced thinkers, discuss the ideas of a given figure with an emphasis on particular artistic media or contexts: Benjamin with lyric poetry and architecture as urban art forms; Adorno with music; Marcuse with the liberationist art performances and happenings of the 1960s.
Key Features:
Introduces well-studied major figures such as Benjamin and Adorno in a new light, while connecting their ideas with problems in modernist art and cultureOffers a clear, thorough, and relevant survey of major ideas and figuresProvides a revisionary view of the rigorous connection of Frankfurt School theory and modernist culture

Review Quotes

This book is masterful in the economy of its summaries, paraphrases, and analyses of the principal contributors to the School, in the scope of its references and allusions to context, and in its insights into the historicity of the School's development in the different locales and phases through which the School passed over the course of its evolution. Miller has a gift for grasping the heart of the matter of any complex argument or performance.-- "Hayden White"

While the Frankfurt school shaped the concept of "modernism", it also got stuck between "high art" and "mass culture". Modernism and the Frankfurt School audaciously reframes the critical discussion. It engages with literature, music, the visual arts and the theater, to highlight modernism's "turbulent now" with unrivaled brilliance and intelligence.-- "Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania"

About the Author

Tyrus Miller is Dean in the School of Humanities and Professor of English and Art History at the University of California at Irvine, USA. His publications include Modernism and the Frankfurt School (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avantgarde (Northwestern University Press, 2009), Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (University of California Press, 1999). He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and editor and translator of György Lukács, The Culture of People's Democracy: Hungarian Essays on Literature, Art, and Democratic Transition (Brill Publishers, 2013).