Abstract

This essay first contextualizes Adorno's essays in literary criticism in relation to his historico‐philosophical account of modern rationalization and late capitalism, his dialectical theory of culture, and his return to postwar Germany. It then presents the neo‐Marxist and formalist principles that inform his literary criticism, emphasizing the artwork's critical relationship to society, on the one hand, and the theory of aesthetic experience undergone by the artwork's recipient on the other. These principles are exemplified in selective readings of Adorno's essays on Heinrich Heine and Friedrich Hölderlin. The essay concludes by polemically juxtaposing Adorno's practice of literary criticism with that of neo‐Aristotelian “ethical criticism.”