Literary Theory and Criticism

Critical Theory is, by and large, concerned with the critique of modernity, modernization, and the modern state. The first generation of critical theorists – Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm – came together in the early 1930s from different disciplines within the humanities and social sciences in order to analyze and critique ideologies, institutions, discourses, and media as well as to research the social psychology of disturbing new trends like fascism and the “administered society.” All of these figures, except Benjamin, were officially connected with the Institute for Social Research which was founded by Felix Weil in the years following the First World War and became part of Frankfurt University in 1923. They were dedicated to studying society from a Marxian perspective, but diverged from classical Marxism in their emphasis on “superstructural phenomena” (e.g., problems of culture, class formation, and ideological hegemony) as opposed to the modes of production and economic forces that for classical Marxism determine such phenomena more or less mechanistically. Though rooted in Hegelian or Kantian traditions, Frankfurt school theorists were critical of the visions of totality (social, political, historical, and aesthetic) associated with these two philosophers.

The aim of the Institute in its early years (1930–64) was to develop a comprehensive social theory that would both describe relations of power and domination and facilitate and encourage radical social transformations. Adorno’s main concerns, like Horkheimer’s, were for the quality and value of human life, for the preservation of happiness, leisure, and aesthetic experience. The most important work of this period was their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), a critique of modernity in the form of “philosophical fragments,” critical analyses of Enlightenment thinking, anti-Semitism, the “culture industry,” and the administered society. The Enlightenment is here regarded as incorporating within its dialectical trajectory the very thing it seeks to overcome: mythology. “Mythology itself sets off the unending process of enlightenment,” and “[j]ust as the myths already realize enlightenment, so enlightenment with every step becomes more deeply engulfed in mythology” (11–12). This dialectical interaction is already at work in Homer, whose epic organization is at variance with mythic reality: “The venerable cosmos of the meaningful Homeric world is shown to be the achievement of regulative reason, which destroys myth by virtue of the same rational order in which it reflects it” (44). The disenchantment of the mythic unity of nature ultimately led to the alienated subjectivity of modernity and the rationalization and commodification of culture. It also created the conditions in which anti-Semitism and the “final solution” could flourish amid all of the advances of human science, philosophy, and art.

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