T HEODOR W. Adorno is almost unknown in the English-
speaking world as a literary critic. Although he wrote
some fifty essays on literary topics -- among them pieces
on Goethe, Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, Franz Kafka, Hugo
von Hofmannsthal, and Honoré de Balzac -- his reputation as a
critic is largely based on his contributions to music criticism.
Among American musicologists his work on Arnold Schönberg,
Gustav Mahler, and Richard Wagner, for example, is well known.
His music criticism has received an acclaim that has been denied
to his literary essays, although these essays are by no means less
important than his writing on music. ¹ As far as the Frankfurt
School is concerned, the literary criticism of Walter Benjamin
has almost completely eclipsed the contributions of Adorno. The
irony is that it was Adorno who launched Benjamin's rediscovery
after World War II. Without the two-volume edition of his work
that Adorno brought out in 1955 -- which, incidentally, empha-
sized through its selection Benjamin's early criticism and deem-
phasized his Marxist phase -- Benjamin would probably be a for-
gotten author today.

How do we explain the absence of attention to Adorno's literary
criticism in the United States? The obvious but clearly insufficient
answer is that most of his essays have been translated relatively
recently. Yet although even his most complex work, Aesthetic The-
ory, was finally made available to the English-speaking reader in
1984 and has subsequently begun to make an impact, the re-
sistance to his literary essays has not yet been overcome. This has
in part to do with their character. They are hardly conventional
academic articles dealing with acknowledged research topics in an
accepted academic manner. Instead, they are almost without ex-
ception highly personal, subjective, critical interventions written
in a very uncommon style. To appreciate them, one must pay
attention to their form and manner of presentation as much as to

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