Fragments of Thought 1

Theodor Adorno was neither a literary critic nor even a literary theorist in the conventional sense, nor was he a man of letters as commonly defined. However, one of our era’s most renowned literary critics, Susan Sontag, evaluated his literary essays as follows: “A single volume” of Adorno’s essays is equivalent to a whole shelf of various books on literature. Adorno’s intellectual life and its outcomes are full of such contradictions and enigmas. The only way to engage with Adorno’s works is by striving to understand these contradictions and finding specific and distinct answers to each puzzle. In the present book, after presenting points regarding Theodor Adorno’s aesthetics, the author has compiled essays of this nature: The War of Interpretations in the Passage to Modernity: A Note on the Last War of Time; The Ghosts of Hedayat (an essay on the literary value of Hedayat’s works); “Art, the Form of Truth”; “The Future of Death”; and “Dialogues on Tragedy.” The appendix section also includes two essays: Fragments of Thought (this text is the body of an essay originally titled Contradictions of Modernism); and “Entropy and the Death of Tragedy: An Obituary.”