Essay writing: essay form in the late 20th century
admin @ January 6, 2008
Essay writing: This pessimistic but aesthetically productive analysis of the state of the essay form in the late 20th century seems to have inspired Adorno to produce many of his essays in the Notes on Literature. the title of this work in itself (which could equally be translated as "notes for literature") indicates that Adorno accords poetic language a central significance, viewing literature in terms of musical composition. Most of the essays consider the role of language in society and in the modern age. In his essay "Zum Klassizismus von Goethes Iphigenie" ( 1974; On the classicism of Goethe’s Iphigenia), for example, Adorno recognizes the redemptive power of language as a medium of truth and appeasement in Goethe’s classical work. Language helps unravel the entanglement of barbarism and civilization. "Language becomes the representative of order and at the same time produces order from freedom, from subjectivity," is Adorno’s verdict on Goethe’s treatment of the Iphigenia story.
Essay writing: Here, Adorno turns against the traditional view that Goethe’s work "denied the power of negativity and fabricated a spurious harmony." He quotes directly from the text to show that Orestes "by dint of his stark antithesis to the myth, threatens to fall victim to it." In this way, according to Adorno, Goethe’s play prophesies the transition from Enlightenment to mythology. This farsighted and controversial critique of the Enlightenment through the interpretation of Goethe’s Iphigenia can succeed only because Adorno presents it in the form of the essay, which can incorporate antithetical elements and in which a dialectical method of argumentation can be deployed to the full.
Essay writing: The contradictions which, according to Adorno, arise from the fact that language simultaneously represents and creates order, are becoming ever more acute as the modern age progresses. Just as the possibility of order seems to be increasingly elusive, so the utopia of language is disappearing in the representation of this impossibility. For this reason, as Adorno describes in his essay on Beckett ("Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen" [ 1961; "Attempt to Understand Endgame"]), the language of modern art is now no more than a differential of silence. The failure of language, which Beckett expresses in a number of ways, is interpreted by Adorno as the crisis of an existential terror which is literally lost for words. Beckett’s existentialism gives expression to the catastrophe of the modern age, by reducing the drama (Endgame) to silent gestures.
Essay writing: the organized meaninglessness that characterizes Beckett’s work is apparent in the fact that the play has neither beginning, end, nor dramatic progression in between. Instead the whole drama is composed using techniques of reversal and negation. For Adorno this is a dramatic depiction of the final stage in the historical disintegration of subjectivity. The suffering of the figures in the play, and that of the reader who recognizes this existential finality, become for Adorno the measure of human awareness.
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