Reappraisals

Peter Uwe Hohendahl is Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is an editor of the series Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought, which is copublished by Cornell University Press and the Cornell University Library. He is the author most recently of The Fleeting Promise of Art: Adorno's Aesthetic Theory Revisited, also from Cornell.

At the center of Reappraisals is the political question of where to locate critical agency in (post)modern societies. Hohendahl thus identifies the crucial question that links the work of the Frankfurt School to contemporary debates about postmodernity. His collection of essays spans the entire history of critical theory, displaying its interactions with rival paradigms of cultural politics—from the influence of Lukacs (as inventor of Western Marxism) to postmodernism and New Historicism.(German Quarterly)