Prismatic Thought

Prismatic Thought is a brilliant tour of Adorno's work, with special emphasis on his aesthetic writings. Peter Uwe Hohendahl opens with a pair of chapters that consider Adorno's years of exile in the united States during the Second World War and his return in the early 1950s to a West Germany harrowed by its recent Nazi past and responsibility for the Holocaust. Hohendahl then examines Adorno's writings on literature, language, poetry, philosophy, and mass culture in relation to modern history.