Immanent Critique (En)counters Transcendent Critique and Vice-Versa: Adorno’s Dialectical Literary Criticism

Abstract

This study addresses Theodor W. Adorno’s dialectical literary criticism and shows how it arises from the critique of an alternative model of literary (and cultural) criticism, closer to the critique of ideology in its more traditional sense in texts from the 1930s written by two other authors affiliated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Herbert Marcuse and Leo Löwenthal. In addition to describing Adorno’s view of these two ways of approaching literary objects and calling attention to their yields and limitations, this study emphasizes how Adorno’s criticism dialectically conducts the immanent critique of artistic forms to its opposite extreme, reaching, by a deep dive into the particular of the works, their most general meaning. This enables the author to overcome a certain impasse that is configured in the dichotomy between internalist and externalist criticism of literary works, insofar as his model of literary criticism considers the contradictory character of art in modern capitalist society: neither mere ideology that simply restores domination nor a sphere preserved from social contradictions, but a sphere that, in its relative autonomy, comprises a social truth.