Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory – serie

Theodor Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist and musicologist and was a leading member and eventually director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.Adorno studied an extraordinary range of subjects during his lifetime – from dialectical logic and the syntax of poetry to newspaper astrology columns and the Hollywood studio system – and he left a significant mark on each of the many disciplines in which he worked. His philosophically sophisticated rethinking of Marxian materialism has been central to much European and American social theory in the latter half of the twentieth century and his studies of mass culture, radio and television were foundational documents for the discipline of cultural studies.This collection charts the most important moments in the international reception of Adorno's thinking, covering the wide range of disciplines his studies touched upon, including literary criticism, musicology, aesthetics, epistemology and metaphysics.There is also a great deal of important scholarship and commentary on Adorno in German that remains untranslated into English. This set will therefore provide Anglophone scholars with the first English translations of these important works.

No other single author has so commanding a critical presence across so many disciplines within the arts and humanities, in so many national contexts, as Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). The belated reception of his work as a literary critic (dating from the late 1950s) has been followed by a rapid series of critical receptions in different contexts: Frankfurt Critical Theory and Marxism, Judaism, Film Theory, Post-structuralism, Philosophical Romanticism, and Cultural Studies.This collection brings together a selection of the most critically important items in the literature, across the full range of Benjamin's cultural-theoretical interests, from all periods of the reception of his writings, but focusing upon the most recent, to produce a comprehensive overview of the best critical literature.

Thirty years ago the English-speaking world was discovering the work of some of the key poststructuralist theorists for the first time: Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology had just appeared in translation, as had Roland Barthes’ S/Z, Jacques Lacan’s Écrits, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production. English editions of Julia Kristeva’s Desire in Language and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition were just around the corner.The subsequent ‘theory wars’ that raged on campuses in the 1980s are now generally seen as a thing of the past: poststructuralism is now, largely, a familiar and widely taught part of the academic landscape in the English-speaking world.Of all the poststructuralists, Roland Barthes (1915–80) is probably the most widely read. Mythologies has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in paperback and has never been out of print since it first appeared in English in 1972. And ‘The Death of the Author’, his short essay dating from 1968, is probably the most widely anthologized theoretical text of all. Moreover, even though he died over a quarter of a century ago, Barthes remains especially ‘alive’ to English-speaking audiences in that his voluminous writings are still being translated into English.Reflecting the vibrancy and dynamism of Barthes Studies, this four-volume collection, a new title in Routledge’s Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory series, brings together the best and most influential cutting-edge and canonical research on Roland Barthes. The gathered materials address the full range of Barthes’ extremely diverse output to provide the definitive evaluation of his work.With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Roland Barthes is an essential work of reference. It is destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital research resource.