Winter 2001
Volume 27, Number 2

Frankfurt school aesthetics has never quite fallen off the literary-cultural map; yet as with other areas of what currently goes by the name theory, interest in this body of work has known its surges and dormancies. For reasons too complex really to develop here (but which certainly involve, after two decades of critique, some changing Left views on aesthetics in and since the Enlightenment), we've recently seen widespread renewal of attention to the Frankfurt oeuvre and especially to the work of Theodor Adorno. The attention shows every sign of increasing in scope and influence and thus invites more sustained reconsideration of a theoretical legacy and its animating literary/artistic, philosophical, and historical materials.1 The attention also promises a return to foundational disputes in and around Frankfurt aesthetics, including those debates most famously joined between Adorno and Walter Benjamin: debates over mechanical reproduction, aura, and aesthetic autonomy; formalism, hermeticism, and engaged, interventionist commitment; mimesis, expression, and construction. As these topics are revisited, fresh analyses of old controversies undoubtedly will find their way into literary-historical treatments of different periods, movements, and problems, providing, one hopes, illumination without narrow prescription, shedding light when applying (albeit somewhat allegorically) Frankfurt theory to various questions.2

Tracing the trajectory in the opposite direction--not retrospectively applying Frankfurt aesthetics to previous literary periods, but demonstrating how prior literary histories shape and help clarify recurrent problems in modernism and Frankfurt Critical Theory themselves--would stand to be a rarer phenomenon, if only because earlier studies seem to have covered that ground. And whatever might be added to the composite picture, it's probably safe to say that some of the least likely sources for further historical inquiry into the modernist, Marxian, and German materials at issue would reside in second-generation British romanticism and its Victorian aftermath. It would seem still more improbable that key information would emerge from the work of nineteenth-century British literature's perhaps most decidedly formalist poet, John Keats. And if all that's true, then the most unlikely way to understand Frankfurt Marxism should be via a critic renowned in our own time for sympathy to monumental Keatsian form and antipathy to politically inflected literary analysis, a critic generally deemed, in fact, the champion of aesthetic formalism tout court: Helen Vendler. It may already be evident that this essay will undertake precisely that effort of understanding; it may not be clear that the endeavor proceeds absent any notion of antithetical, oppositional reading of Vendler, absent even a claim to dialecticize her interpretations. I want instead to argue that in an unexpectedly straightforward way, Keatsian formalism--and Vendler's formalist defense of it--are crucial for grasping Frankfurt analyses (Adorno's above all) of what Marx and then modern Marxism try to do with nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, aesthetics, and the dialectical tradition. If the argument unsettles some contemporary Left tenets about the relative priorities of form and history (or of form and politics, culture, or society), it nonetheless may contribute to our understanding of the aesthetic's place in Frankfurt attempts to articulate possibilities for critical thought, agency, and praxis in modernity.

[...]

My primary intent will be diacritically to engage Keats's work and exemplary issues in its critical history, along with their afterlives in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry. I hope thereby to get at the ways that an identifiably Keatsian constellation of formalism, monumentality, and negative capability--hardly the favored concepts and rubric of today's critics of aesthetic ideology--may actually be perceived, in its charged interactions with a Shelleyan-identified poetic of negationalist voice, movement, and dissemination, to underwrite fundamental traditions in two centuries of Left poetics, as well as foundational aspects of the Marxian critical aesthetics most frequently identified with Adorno.

1. The most cursory listing of important new Critical Theory studies would cite those by both veterans and relative newcomers to the field, including Susan Buck-Morss, Martin Jay, Fredric Jameson, Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Robert Hullot-Kentor, Miriam Hansen, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Russell A. Berman, Richard Wolin, Lambert Zuidervaart, Anthony Cascardi, Tom Huhn, and Beatrice Hanssen. These studies have appeared together with much-needed translations and retranslations of key texts, such as Theodor Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 7 of Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, under the title Aesthetic Theory, ed. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, 1997); and Noten zur Literatur, 4 vols. (Frankfort am Main, 1958-74), trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, under the title Notes to Literature, ed. Tiedemann, 2 vols. (New York, 1991-92).

2. For a trenchant essay on allegorical application/assimilation of Frankfurt theory to inapposite literary cases, see Marcus Bullock, "Benjamin, Baudelaire, Rossetti, and the Discovery of Error," Modern Language Quarterly 53 (June 1992): 201-25. I use allegorical here not in the usual Benjaminian or deconstructive sense of oppositional corrective to an illusory symbolic unity, but more loosely to designate interpretive applications made between parallel objects of study where the contextual, artistic, and theoretical materials themselves may not ultimately justify any necessary structural and/or historical connection.

Robert Kaufman is assistant professor of English at Stanford University. He is presently completing two related studies, Negative Romanticism, Almost Modernity: Keats, Shelley, and Adornian Critical Aesthetics and Experiments in Construction: Frankfurt School Aesthetics and Contemporary Poetry; he has also begun work on a third project, "Hamlet"'s Form of the Modern. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry was "Red Kant, or The Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson" (Summer 2000).