Abstract

This study examines the various ways in which the paradigm of music informs the account of the literary arts given by the philosopher, composer, theorist of modernism and sometimes-literary critic Theodor W. Adorno. Comparing Adorno's literary essays with his writings on music the study explores the interrelationship of music and language in Adorno's account of modernism. The first two chapters examine the musical origins of Adorno's account of modernism in Philosophy of New Music and contextualize this account within his representationally oriented critique of Western rationality articulated in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The remaining three chapters compare and contrast Adorno's account of the historical dynamic of literary modernism with the historical dynamic of modern music, arguing that key concepts informing Adorno's understanding of the dynamic of modernism---artistic material, aesthetic autonomy and subjective expression---developed from his intimate knowledge of the music of the Second Viennese School. When Adorno returned to Germany from exile in 1949 , he turned to literary criticism as a means to disseminate his views on modern art to a broader audience than musical topics allowed. In essays on the literary works of Goethe, Holderlin, Eichendorff, Heine, George, Kafka, Brecht and Beckett Adorno describes language which extricates itself from the means-ends logic of instrumental reason as music-like in nature or as playing over into music. In all of these essays music functions as a representational ideal realized not by direct imitation of musical forms, but by language which expresses particularity, subjective suffering and the non-identical by negating the generalizing, abstract nature of discursive language. Though these essays are indebted to Adorno's writings on music and his understanding of formal dissonance derived from the evolution of Schonberg's music, they also indicate that Adorno had begun to question the central status of music in the postwar period. Thus Adorno's literary essays are central to understanding why the trajectory of modernism outlined in the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory runs from Beethoven to Wagner, to Schonberg, to Beckett and not, in the latter case, to Boulez, Stockhausen or Cage.