The ways in which critical theory has influenced literary studies are numerous and complex. Cultural studies, sociological approaches, various political or philosophical criticisms, various formalisms or modes of attention to history, genre, and so on frequently make use of the work of the Frankfurt School and of the theorists more or less coherently grouped under the different generations of critical theorists. But at the heart of critical theory and its development lies a particular theory of literature, and a particular method of literary criticism that is too often forgotten when we bring the work of critical theorists to literary studies. There are a number of ways in which critical theory may be applied to the study of literature, but critical theory also contains a detailed method for literary studies, one that is aimed at studying literature as medium on its own terms. This method for literary criticism is in turn bound up with a critical theory of literature. This chapter will aim to reconstruct the method for literary criticism and the fundamental definitions that guide its theory of literature that emerge out of critical theory. In order to do so, it will focus largely on the first generation of critical theorists in the context of whose work this specific theory of literature and critical methodology was developed.
The chapter will also seek to illustrate that the development of a literary critical method and specific theory of literature was not simply one facet of the work of a few member of the Frankfurt School who had a more or less consistent interest in literature. Rather, we will see that the way in which T.W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin thought about literature, and the kind of critical praxis to which their engagement with literature gave rise, in turn shaped critical theory itself along with the ways in which its members thought about concepts such as history, form, or (self-) consciousness. In order to survey some of the methodological foundations of a critical theory of literature, which, for reasons of space, will constitute the focus of what follows in order to hopefully aid further, more detailed study, this chapter will focus on some of the central categories of literary criticism that occupy a crucial role in critical theory: interpretation, form, medium, the status of reader and author, and the relation between the literary work and external, material history. The aim will be to clarify some of our fundamental literary critical commitments that may guide what we do when we bring critical theory to a literary text. The chapter will explore the question of what kind of literary criticism we practice when we seek to do it from the standpoint of critical theory.
While critical theory more widely conceived has had a great international impact on academic practice and debate, its literary critical core arguably is lagging behind. To be sure, dozens and dozens of articles and books of literary criticism have drawn upon concepts and ideas borrowed from critical theory. But even for second and third generation Frankfurt School critics the particular attention to literary critical method and the significance of the literary work that, as we shall see, was so central to the work of the founding members of the Frankfurt School, is no longer visible. What we see frequently in literary criticism is the application to literary texts of concepts and ideas that are borrowed from the canon of critical theory. What we encounter far less frequently, however, are literary critical projects that bring critical theory to a literary text not only on a conceptual level but also with a rigorously developed account of what a critical theory of literature might mean for our method of literary criticism and for our understanding of what literature is and does. As we shall see, this is no trivial matter. The work of both Adorno and Benjamin centrally involves a methodological opposition to the practice of simply bringing a philosophical concept to a text in order to generate a new ‘reading’. Both theorists develop specific ways of treating literature and of understanding the relation between critic and literary work, and revisiting these orientations may help us avoid generating a criticism that may on the surface be committed to the ideas and politics of critical theory but that may bring them to literary texts without any regard for the method for literary criticism that critical theory produced, thus ultimately undercutting the foundations of its own efforts. Critical theory’s attention to literature, thus, is not merely a matter of bringing established concepts to literary texts. It is a matter of devising a particular method that treats literature on its own terms, a method that, in other words, is specifically formulated for the task at hand. A literary criticism based on critical theory must therefore also contain and be guided by a consideration of the relation between object and method and of the historical specificity of this relation.
A final introductory note: while the concluding section will briefly turn to the work of Leo Löwenthal, much of this chapter will be dedicated to the work of two main figures: Adorno and Benjamin. This may strike readers who are familiar with the history of critical theory and the Frankfurt School as somewhat strange. After all, Benjamin is often not counted among the core members of the Frankfurt School. But the nature or scale of his direct involvement, I would argue, is less significant for our effort to understand the relation between critical theory and literary theory than is Benjamin’s intellectual influence. In particular, when it comes to understanding critical theory’s relationship to literature, its development of a particular kind of literary theory and of a specific method of literary criticism, Benjamin’s significance cannot be overstated. In fact, even our attempts to understand Adorno’s thought on literature and literary criticism would remain incomplete if we bracketed Benjamin’s influence on Adorno’s thought and work. Even more widely conceived, however, since, as we shall see, the ways in which critical theorists thought about literature shaped the development of critical theory as a whole, we can also see from this perspective that we must consider the impact of Benjamin’s literary criticism on the work of critical theorists and on the development of critical theory itself. This is not to disregard the substantive and numerous disagreements between Benjamin and Adorno and other key members of the Frankfurt School. It is, rather, to focus on the important influences and commonalities without which our picture of a critical theory of literature and literary criticism remains incomplete.
Anglophone academics have occasionally explored Benjamin’s role as a literary critic, though by no means as frequently as Benjamin has shown up in academic production as a philosopher or critic of modernist aesthetics, or in the study of culture and media (film photography, and so on). The question that prompts one of the few more recent engagements with his literary criticism, the question that Svend Eric Larsen selects as the title of his essay to which I shall return below, is: is Benjamin a literary critic? That is a strange question to ask, it might seem, because, next to Adorno and Löwenthal, Benjamin is the critic whose work most consistently engages in the study of literature. After all, the core of Benjamin’s work is aimed at the study of literature, and it was in the field of literary criticism that he sought to establish himself principally. Michael W. Jennings observes that Benjamin’s rapid canonization in the academy following the publication of his selected works was not quite a fulfillment of ‘Benjamin’s expressed desire to be considered “the premier critic of German literature”’, not only because his canonization was followed by a ‘swift denunciation’, but in particular, Jennings argues, because this denunciation focused largely on aspects of Benjamin’s work that had little direct relation to literary criticism: ‘Benjamin’s mysticism … his Marxism … his Hegelianism’ and so on (1983: 545). What Jennings stresses already in 1983 as an important project – evaluating Benjamin’s contribution to literary criticism that has thus far not been adequately mapped – remains an insufficiently developed project; only a few critical projects, in the Anglophone academy in particular, have been dedicated to this task. It is possible to suggest, therefore, that the persistence of the question of whether Benjamin was indeed a literary critic has to do with the fact that a disproportionally small amount of time has been spent on the examination of the methodological foundations of Benjamin’s literary criticism compared to the widespread interest in Benjamin’s work on the philosophy of history or cultural theory more widely conceived, including his work on urban modernity, photography, or film. Larsen, too, suggests that Benjamin’s prominence in the Anglophone academy is largely based on the interest in his work that outlines a cultural history of modernity or that is dedicated to broader aesthetic and historical questions. It is also true, as Larsen contends, that his interest in literature itself does not make Benjamin a literary critic (1998: 135–6). But what this does suggest is that, in order to understand both Benjamin’s own relation to literary criticism as well as his contribution to this field, we must examine his considerations of literary criticism as a method that are, as we shall see, based upon the development of a specific theory of literature.
In his classic essay on Benjamin’s early literary criticism, René Wellek, too, begins by foregrounding the phenomenon of Benjamin’s critical reception as a literary critic who is largely not regarded as such. Benjamin, Wellek argues, is largely treated as a philosopher or, at best, as a ‘Kulturphilosoph’, which in turn means that it is his later work, as opposed to his earlier work that contains a central focus on literary criticism and is the subject of critics’ main interest. Even Hannah Arendt, who describes Benjamin as ‘the only true critic of German literature’, Wellek notes, poignantly drops this interest in Benjamin as a literary critic and instead proceeds to focus her work on his aesthetic philosophy (Wellek, 1971: 124). But to ignore this aspect of Benjamin’s work, Wellek cautions, ‘is to falsify the image of Benjamin’, for it ‘obscures any attempt to locate him properly in intellectual history’ (1971: 124). Therefore, to appreciate Benjamin’s work fully is to consider his methodological engagement with literary criticism and theory, an engagement that underpins the development of his thought and critical system more largely conceived. And, in turn, to understand Benjamin’s literary critical methodology is also to understand some of the crucial influences and logical foundations that underwrote the development of critical theory itself. A way into understanding Benjamin’s critical method, which is at the same time a way into understanding the role of literary criticism and literary theory for the development of critical theory more broadly conceived, is to focus on one of critical theory’s foundations: immanent criticism. As we shall see, immanent criticism finds one of its most clear applications in literary criticism. In turn, immanent criticism is a crucial building block of the method of literary study that is developed out of the work of the Frankfurt School.
The origins of the immanent criticism are articulated by Max Horkheimer who, as David Held outlines in profoundly helpful detail, associates immanent criticism intimately with the project of critical theory and with the core of critical theory’s method. Quoting Horkheimer, Held writes:
Critical theory aims to assess ‘the breach between ideas and reality’. The method of procedure is immanent criticism. Immanent criticism confronts ‘the existent, in its historical context, with the claim of its conceptual principles, in order to criticize the relation between the two and thus transcend them’. (1980: 183)
‘Critique proceeds, so to speak, “from within”’, Held stresses, which means, in other words, that critique,
hopes to avoid, thereby, the charge that its concepts impose irrelevant criteria of evaluation on the object. As a result, a new understanding of the object is generated – a new comprehension of contradictions and possibilities. Thus, the original image of the object is transcended and the object itself is brought partly into flux. (1980: 184)
Already in this very basic formulation, we can see some of the foundational ideas that inform a method for literary criticism. From the beginning, critical theory approaches literature via the principle of immanent critique, which is to say that the basic critical treatment of the literary work ‘proceeds from within’. The aim to keep the object in flux, to examine it as always bound up with specific historical developments to which it in turn contributes, is paired with the desire to avoid simply bringing a new interpretive lens to a literary work from the outside. Instead of imposing external concepts onto the text in order to generate new readings, any literary criticism based upon critical theory begins by approaching the text on its own terms, from within.
We can begin to see what this implies more concretely by turning to one of Adorno’s numerous engagements with the work of Thomas Mann, an essay that exemplifies this basic methodological commitment in part via Adorno’s dissatisfaction with some of the dominant contemporary critical approaches to Mann’s work. ‘In order to understand Thomas Mann’, Adorno suggests, we need to pay ‘attention to the things that are not in the guidebooks’ and that aren’t covered in the ‘stream of dissertations’ that focus on ‘the influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’ or on academic seminar discussions of ‘the problem of death’ in Mann (1992: 13). Instead, Adorno suggests,
it is better to look three times at what has been written than to look over and over again at what has been symbolized. Pointing out how much the writer deviated from the self-portrait his prose suggests is intended to help do that. For there is no doubt that the prose does suggest this. (1992: 13)
What we see here is an attempt to avoid forced readings of a text that are constructed by imposing external concepts upon the text. Instead, Adorno suggests, we ought to treat Mann’s work from within, which means to focus on Mann’s prose, on the ways in which Mann’s texts themselves can be read as formally specific mediations of external reality. One of the basic operations of an immanent criticism of literature, in other words, is a focus on form. This focus on form is visible in Adorno’s work more generally. One of the guiding logical principles of his Aesthetic Theory, for instance, is a focus on form. Throughout Aesthetic Theory, Adorno (1997) returns time and again to the suggestion that history enters the work of art not on the level of content but only on the level of form, and we see this fundamental commitment also in his literary critical method, exemplified in his defense of the formal richness of Mann’s work that an immanent criticism of literature seeks to treat from within. Literary critical debate in the twenty-first century has frequently returned to the tension between different modes of reading and mis-reading. We have seen a renewed interest in strategies for and ways of reading, including questions of what we should read, how closely we should read, or how aspects of the ‘big data’ turn may affect reading practices and our approaches to the literary text and literary archives. And since a number of these debates also include hotly contested propositions or approaches (among the most infamous and widely discussed of which are ‘surface reading’ or the more recent debates about ‘post-criticism’), there is no doubt much at stake in reminding ourselves that immanent criticism allows us to reframe precisely this old tension between text and method in ways that refuse simple binary oppositions such as that between author and reader, closeness and distance, depth or surface.
The attention to literary form, then, is of central importance to an immanent criticism of literature. More generally, Held argues, ‘The meaning of Adorno’s thought cannot be fully comprehended if one concentrates simply on content at the expense of form’ (1990: 210). Adorno’s own writing also follows this dialectical logic of form and content, and, as Held reminds us, ‘enact[s] his concern with the development of repressive systems of thought and organization’ (1990: 210). Adorno’s desire for social and cultural theory to reveal the substance of repressive systems, and, as Adorno puts it so frequently, suffering more generally, is therefore not merely a matter of reading the content of objects but rather of investigating the formal mediation of such external forces in and through the text. ‘The non-identical, if it is to be revealed’, as Held summarizes Adorno’s basic insistence with regard to this method, ‘must … be made apparent in the form and the content of a work’ (1990: 211). We must therefore conclude, Held argues, that for Adorno ‘there is more involved in the reading of a text … than the gleaning of information’ (1990: 211). This is what we can understand as one of the foundational commitments of an immanent criticism of literature: the commitment to reading for form. And indeed, as Fredric Jameson reminds us, it is important to note the continuity here in Adorno’s thought in general, since his broader philosophical engagement with (self-)consciousness and the relation between subject and object that guides works like Negative Dialectics informs and is in turn informed by his examination of literature. After all, Jameson suggests, Adorno’s writings on the question of the relation between subject and object are recast, in the context of his writings on literature and aesthetics, as the relation between form and content (1974: 39).
For Benjamin, too, critical engagements with literature begin by examining the dialectic of form and content. Of course, Adorno is famously more committed to the centrality of form than was Benjamin – form often remains the main if not sole plane of examination for Adorno, while Benjamin’s criticism is largely aimed at the dialectical connection of form and content. But, as suggested above, in order to understand Benjamin’s methodological investment in the dialectic of form and content more generally, we must trace the roots of his method to his literary critical writings and thus to some of his earliest work. The critical analysis of art and art criticism that guides his doctoral dissertation examining the concept of Kunstkritik (art criticism or critique of art) in German Romanticism establishes Benjamin’s concern with method, and his subsequent early work, most notably his examination of the origins of the German Trauerspiel (tragic drama), lays the foundations of his attention to the specific ways in which literature and literary forms emerge historically and in turn respond to history (the latter famously being conceived as an ongoing, discontinuous process). And while we can no doubt trace many disagreements between Adorno and Benjamin when it comes to their account of the status of literature and the function and possibility of particular literary forms and genres, what matters for our purposes here are the basic commonalities with regard to method that join their approaches. Central to their examinations of literature, for instance, is the category of medium. This includes a grounding focus on literature as an artistic medium that establishes one of the points of departure that makes possible an immanent criticism of literature that truly treats the literary work on its own terms. A constant in the work of Adorno and Benjamin, therefore, is the concern with the historically specific relations and differences between different artistic media, which underlies both their accounts of the historically specific possibilities and limitations of different artistic media and their particular critical engagement with literature. Very prominent here, for instance, are the various examinations of the historically specific relation between literature and other, newer or more recent media that we find in the work of both Adorno and Benjamin.
For Adorno, for instance, any consideration of the novel would have to begin by launching an inquiry into its historical status. In Adorno’s discussion of the ‘contemporary novel’ (contemporary with his time, that is), he begins by assessing the changed historical status and function of the novel. ‘Just as painting lost many of its traditional tasks to photography’, Adorno writes, ‘the novel has lost them to reportage and the media of the culture industry, especially film’ (1991a: 31). ‘This would imply’, Adorno continues, ‘that the novel should concentrate on what reportage will not handle. In contrast to painting, however, language imposes limits on the novel’s emancipation from the object and forces the novel to present the semblance of a report’ (1991a: 31). Adorno consequently focuses on the novel form’s particular historical labor, in this case the novel’s ‘rebellion against realism’ and against ‘discursive language’ that Adorno finds most prominently exemplified in the work of James Joyce. Thus, when Adorno examines the novel and its more well known aspects – its engagement with alienation in the modernist novel, for instance – this examination is always carried out primarily not on a topical level or the level of content but on the level of both form (novelistic language) and medium (the novel’s historically specific function as an artistic medium is in part determined intermedially, that is, by its awareness of its own medial possibilities and limitations). Adorno’s examination of the modernist novel is also always an inquiry into the status of the medium of literature and its particular forms and genres. Adorno here also considers the rise of popular literature, which he associates with a crisis of the novel. The novel’s uneasy relation to reporting, for instance, also raises the question of the status of popular forms of reporting in writing: ‘the cheap biographical literature one finds everywhere is a byproduct of the disintegration of the novel form itself’ (1991a: 32).
If Adorno does address himself to topics, ideas, or individual concepts, such as alienation, this happens primarily on the level of form, with a parallel consideration of the question of medium. Adorno considers alienation largely insofar as it functions as ‘an aesthetic device’, for instance, an examination that is at every point committed to tracing the relation between form and history. Alienation, for Adorno, is bound up with anti-realism in the modernist novel, which, as the novel’s ‘true metaphysical dimension, is called forth by its true subject matter, a society in which human beings have been torn from one another and from themselves. What is reflected in aesthetic transcendence is the disenchantment of the world’ (1991a: 32). As a consequence, Adorno argues, exemplifying the ways in which his literary critical method is at every step connected to a reflection on the ontology and function of literature itself, the status of the novel and the novel’s future survival is bound up with a necessary reflection on its historical lineage and its present historical position. Both considerations must involve a reflection on the question of form and medium: ‘If the novel wants to remain true to its realistic heritage and tell how things really are, it must abandon a realism that only aids the façade in its work of camouflage by reproducing it’ (1991a: 32).
Adorno’s inquiry into the politics of the novel begins with a reflection on the question of form and medium, which in a sense also includes an examination of literariness insofar as Adorno’s work is committed to examining what makes a novel a novel and what possibilities for the novel we may subsequently trace in the context of a particular historical moment. The political advantage of literature over image-based narrative media such as film, which, Adorno suggests at the outset of this essay, has many advantages over the novel, lies precisely in the novel’s medial specificity and its formal advantages. However, with regard to the politics of the novel, Adorno does not confine his treatment of literature fully to the realm of form but, in the final instance, emphasizes the relation between form and the possibility of transcending the limits of the existing, of the contradictions of external, material reality in the present: ‘it is a tendency inherent in form that demands the abolition of aesthetic distance in the contemporary novel and its capitulation thereby to the superior power of reality – a reality that cannot be transfigured in an image but only altered concretely, in reality’ (1991a: 36). The latter call is the final political step, the notion that the novel may not be able to change reality but that it may aid in shaping the preconditions for the transcendence of the existing, in part because the novel itself carries out a version of the method that guides Adorno’s critical treatment of it: literature, too, carries out the work of immanent criticism and is aimed at a critique of the existing from within that is ultimately aimed at transcendence.
We might thus assume that there exists a fairly large distance between Adorno and Benjamin when it comes to the question of medium. After all, Benjamin famously sees in some of the media that Adorno associates with the crisis of true art, a range of positive political and aesthetic possibilities. And yet, when we turn once more to the underlying methodological foundations of their examinations and disregard some of the more well-known surface tensions, we see important moments of congruency. In Dead Time, Elissa Marder traces Benjamin’s account of the development of artistic media in relation to the material history of modernity. For Benjamin, Marder argues, the experience of modernity is specifically characterized by a problem of an ‘overwhelming increase in external stimuli that prevent the impact of particular experiences from becoming assimilated, processed, and remembered’ (2001: 2). Yet, Marder suggests, according to Benjamin this inability to experience all of modernity also gives rise to a multi-faceted cultural response. The first side of this cultural response is the development of cultural media, ‘that are specifically designed to grasp particular experiences in their immediacy’ (2001: 2). Examples of such media include television and film. Precisely in this context, Marder shows, the specificity of literature as a medium becomes crucially important for Benjamin:
Benjamin argues … the more particular experiences are recorded as unmediated impressions, the less they contribute to an enduring sense of experience.… Therefore, if ‘unmediated’ communication cannot transmit the meaning of an experience, it makes sense that Benjamin turns to a highly ‘mediated’ form of experience – poetry – in order to articulate the specific ways in which this change in experience makes itself felt. (2001: 3)
As opposed to television and film, literature refuses the relation of immediacy and insists upon itself as the medium of mediation. What literature does, therefore, is for Benjamin, as for Adorno, a matter of a formal, medially specific dialectical relation to, and immanent critique of, the logic of material reality. For Benjamin, it is lyric poetry that offers a possibility for working through and critically examining modernity’s historically specific ‘atrophy of experience’ and its ‘temporal disorders’ (2001: 3). When we ask, therefore, what precisely is the kind of literary criticism that Adorno and Benjamin practice, we can see that they share fundamental methodological commitments that are more substantial than their surface disagreements, for these basic methodological commitments lend a larger cohesion to what we may call a particular kind of literary criticism and literary theory that emerges out of the Frankfurt School and out of critical theory. These fundamental similarities that may prove more helpful than the negotiation of surface disagreements may also caution us not to dislocate individual arguments and concepts from their methodological foundations, in particular if we are invested in producing a kind of literary criticism that is indebted to critical theory and that is a logical continuation of the foundations of this approach.
After all, Adorno himself warns us time and again that we should not simply bring concepts and sociological or political ideas lifted from a particular tradition to the literary text in order to produce readings via such ‘lenses’. Any examination of the relationship between lyric poetry and society, for instance, as Adorno strongly stresses, must not result in what he calls the ‘abuse’ of lyric works by ‘being made objects with which to demonstrate sociological theses’ (1991b: 38). The focus on form and medium in history is a safeguard against these illegitimate forms of literary criticism – and they are illegitimate in part because they are not a truly literary criticism of literature. After all, such an approach would reduce a literary text, here a lyric poem, to the status of sociological evidence, a reduction that to Adorno is tantamount to abuse. Instead, Adorno suggests, when we ask questions about the relation between lyric poetry and society, we must begin by asking, ‘how the social element in [the lyric poems] is shown to reveal something essential about the basis of their quality’ (1991b: 38). This can be clarified by considering a basic question that may seem to be legitimate in literary criticism but that Adorno refuses: the question of how a given text may give us insights about social structures or problems via its representation of a character’s experience of these historical conditions. ‘The substance of a poem is not merely an expression of individual impulses and experiences’, Adorno maintains, echoing his argument regarding the limits of reporting and realism in the modernist novel outlined above. Impulses and experience ‘become a matter of art only when they come to participate in something universal by virtue of the specificity they acquire by being given aesthetic form’ (1991b: 38). We return here to the centrality of form with respect to the historical specificity of social issues that must be conceived as universal, mediated matters as opposed to matters of individual, immediate experience. ‘The universality of the lyric’s substance, however, is social in nature’, Adorno argues, concluding: ‘only one who hears the voice of humankind in the poem’s solitude can understand what the poem is saying’ (1991b: 39). The next step for Adorno is to turn to the medial specificity of literature that must determine its critical interrogation: ‘reflection on the work of art is … obligated to inquire concretely into its social content and not content itself with a vague feeling of something universal and inclusive. This kind of specification through thought is not some external reflection alien to art; on the contrary, all linguistic works of art demand it’ (1991b: 39). What we see here is another substantive methodological commonality between Adorno and Benjamin, namely the notion that the need for critical interrogation is dialectically bound up with the literary artwork and that this is a foundational aspect of what literature is and what it is able to do.
We shall return to the latter point in more detail below. For now, it is helpful to linger for a moment on the matter of immediacy, which both Adorno and Benjamin consider a crucial problem for both reader and critic and for the work of artistic media. In Adorno and Benjamin the problem of immediacy with regard to artistic media (which, it may be useful to repeat once more, is one of the ways in which literature is able to distinguish itself – as the medium of mediation) is also always bound up with the discussion of immediacy and mediation with regard to the relation between subject and object. That is, the problem of immediacy and mediation in the relation of subject and object also becomes a crucial plane upon which both Benjamin and Adorno explore the question of artistic medium. As Larsen suggests, if we consider this matter, then we are able to appreciate that in Benjamin ‘distance becomes a problem for method as well as for experience’ (1998: 139). ‘Instantaneous experience must be grasped both from within and without at the same time’, Larsen continues, ‘for if the experiencing agent and the interpreting agent are separate, the instant to be interpreted escapes’ (1998: 139). This is one account of why the position of the narrator occupies such an important position in the work of both Adorno and Benjamin since, Larsen argues, it is via the narrator that we get a sense of mediation in its purest form in literature. It is one example of how literature refuses immediacy in favor of a mediated, critically examined relation to the object, and it is also in this sense that we must understand the literary critical method with which this logical system is bound up, since the relation to the text is one of mediation that surpasses the contradiction between immediacy and distance. This becomes clear when we examine the position of the reader and of the role of the author in interpretation in Benjamin.
Like Adorno, Benjamin is profoundly suspicious of the category of experience, in particular with regard to experience as a possible literary critical category (of both narration and reading). This suspicion guides the ways in which Benjamin examines one of the fundamental relationships that informs literary critical practice: the relation between author and reader. Against the Romantic tradition, and, as we saw above, in agreement with Adorno, Benjamin strongly rejects biographical approaches to literature that aim to trace authorial self-expression in the work and that principally define literature as self-expression. Like Adorno, Benjamin also discounts any notion of readerly (immediate) experience as a valid ground for a criticism of literature. Wellek summarizes Benjamin’s opposition to this account of literature and its associated critical method as follows: ‘a work cannot be derived from life…. Nor does Erlebnis define a work of art. Benjamin argues even that this concept is “devised by Philistines to make poetry harmless, to rob it of its relation to truth”’ (1971: 128). But Benjamin goes even further, Wellek argues:
Benjamin rejects with equal emphasis any approach through the reader or his psychology. He dismisses ‘empathy’ or substitution as a mere cloak for what one must assume to be idle curiosity…. In dramatic theory he disagrees with the whole problem of katharsis. Most radically Benjamin formulates: ‘In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful. Not only is any reference to a specific public or its representatives misleading, but even the concept of an “ideal” receiver is detrimental in the theoretical consideration of art since all it assumes is the existence and nature of man as such. Art, in the same way, assumes man’s physical and spiritual existence but in none of its works is it concerned with his response. No poem is intended for the reader. (1971: 129)
Both author and reader matter for Benjamin principally historically, not on the level of intentionality, self expression, or experience, but rather in ways that replace mediation with the pure immediacy to which categories such as readerly experience are connected. And this is also a matter of formulating a literary critical method that treats literature on its own terms and takes seriously literature’s commitment to mediation and the problematization of immediacy, in particular in the context of capitalist modernity. Benjamin’s early work on Romanticism breaks with Romantic notions of literature and criticism in crucial moments and puts history and immanent critique in the place of Romanticism’s fundamental assumptions, thus giving us a changed version of what Romanticism first developed: a true theory of literature and an associated account of literary criticism. These are important coordinates for understanding Benjamin’s intellectual development and the significance of literary criticism and literary theory for the development of critical theory insofar as the literary shapes Benjamin’s thought and exerts an important influence on Adorno as well as on the development of critical theory proper.
Nevertheless, it must be noted that Benjamin’s conception of history is quite different from the more ‘traditional’ dialectical notion of history that we find in, say, Adorno or Horkheimer. And, indeed, his conception of history has been the object of the most infamous attacks on Benjamin’s work, as Larsen suggests, ‘both by his contemporaries such as Bertolt Brecht and … Adorno, and later by, for example, Jürgen Habermas, Peter Bürger, and Hans-Robert Jauss’ (1998: 145). But for the sake of his literary critical method, it is important to foreground, and defend, Benjamin’s emphasis on the present as history, which becomes of central importance for the ways in which Benjamin thinks about reading and interpreting literature – and for a literary work’s continued life, which, as we shall see, depends upon critical readings. As Larsen suggests, the conception of history that we encounter in Benjamin’s later writings (say, on the concept of history) find their origin in his examination of German tragic drama. In the latter, Benjamin focuses mainly on the role of the now, of present-time for our conception of history, and his treatment of the significance of the instant and of the moving present for historical process in the more well-known later writings on history and futurity is anticipated in his examination of the instant as literary motif in his early literary critical writings. It is the focus on the ‘here-and-now of the historical subject’, as Larsen summarizes it, which is of central interest for Benjamin. Most significantly, Larsen argues, the ‘instant is perfectly matched by a literary form: the allegory’: ‘as the literary form of the “actual instant” the allegory is opposed to the symbol, intimately related to the “mystical now” which is identical with the “homogeneous time” mentioned in the theses’ (1998: 148). This matters in particular when we consider the political function of literature and indeed of literary criticism as defined in Benjamin’s work. For Benjamin, as Gabriele Guerra shows, any examination of literary history, and indeed the practice of literary criticism in general, is bound up with an emphasis on the oppositional character of the literary work – an opposition against the work’s and the author’s own time and to the dominant forces of ongoing history [laufende Geschichte] (Guerra, 2015: 246–7). The latter formulation indicates the degree to which history is often understood here as history in the making, as a matter of a historicized examination of the present as history, and it is to this process, Benjamin argues, that true literature addresses itself with great political and epistemological urgency. It is also ideally this process, the process of making history in the present and shaping that which is to come, in which literature may actively participate.
As Held reminds us, ‘immanent criticism derives a certain positive character by pointing to the limits and, therefore, the closed-off possibilities, immanent in the existing order’ (1990: 185–6). Benjamin’s insistence on the oppositional character of literary work is very much in keeping with this formulation of immanent criticism, for we may understand literature’s oppositional character in precisely this way, as one manifestation of an immanent criticism of the existing, and it is also in this way that we can understand Benjamin’s focus on the present as in keeping with the foundations of critical theory. What we can further see here is the dialectical relationship between literary critical and philosophical method, between reading literature and reading history. In Benjamin’s conception of history, as Garloff argues, we can trace the ways in which Benjamin’s work in general is informed by a literary critical logic. That is, when Benjamin seeks to trace the ‘pre-history of the modern’, he does so by making the history of the nineteenth century the object of a literary critical reading (Garland, 2003: 16). Benjamin ‘reads history like a text’ in a manner that reads historical reality as a matter of hermeneutics by ‘establishing a medial continuum between that which existed and the present of reader and critic’ (2003: 16). One clearly sees here traces of Romanticism’s continued influence on Benjamin, as Garloff stresses, inasmuch as the historical world is conceived as a readable text, as a ‘‘world-text” that constitutes a reality sui generis, which gestures toward that which existed in a non-referential, symbolic mode’ (2003: 16). What becomes apparent in Benjamin’s literary critical examination of history is a core conviction that guides his literary critical method that Garloff describes as an ‘anti-empathy-hermeneutics’ with which Benjamin seeks to dislocate the ‘fiction of a continuum of individual experience, poetic expression, and hermeneutic understanding’ (2003: 17).
It is here that we can see in more detail what Benjamin puts in place of readings and forms of literary criticism that are addressed to matters of immediacy or experience. And we can also note a remarkable insistence upon the critical and indeed political stakes of immanent critical readings of literature, not only for criticism itself but also for the continued life of the literary work. Quoting Benjamin, Wellek traces the outlines of this aspect of Benjamin’s method and its connection to Benjamin’s larger philosophical system as follows:
Criticism searches for the truth content of a work of art … or, phrased differently, it ‘looks for the sisters of a work of art which must be found in the realm of philosophy’. Works of art have a deep affinity with the ideal of a philosophical problem. All beauty is related to truth. But Benjamin insists that this relationship must not be thought of as truth being somehow concealed within a work of art. Benjamin expressly disapproves of the Hegelian ‘sensual semblance of the Idea’. Beauty is not a cloak, not a wrapper, not appearance but essence [Wesen]. Criticism must respect the veil: it must not attempt to lift it. The critic can only define an analogon of a work of art. The sublime power of truth appears precisely in the inexpressive, a truth which is discovered in the nature of language. (Wellek, 1971: 127)
The job of the critic is not to uncover hidden meanings. Instead, the work of the literary critic as outlined by Benjamin is bound up with Benjamin’s insistence on the Fortleben, the continued life, that is, of the literary work. Benjamin insists upon a literary critical praxis and method that is formulated in relation to the object with which it engages and that indeed carries on the work of the object itself. That is, as Garloff suggests, literary criticism is for Benjamin not simply a matter of diagnosing philosophical ideas or concepts, nor is it a matter of judging the literary work’s quality or of grasping, understanding, or interpreting authorial intention. Rather, Benjamin conceives of ‘critique as the medium of the fulfillment and the potentiating continued life of its object’ (2003: 6–7). A literary work in this sense, Garloff continues, is not simply understood by Benjamin as the carrier of meaning or a vessel for ideas that it seeks to communicate. Rather, in keeping with the core logic of critical theory and immanent criticism, a work is understood as the carrier of symbolic meaning that is supplemented by criticism rather than philologically reconstructed by criticism.
Criticism, in other words, is for Benjamin a creative and also a potentiating act, a force which becomes the motor of the potential for meaning, relevance, and thought that the work carries only as abstract, not yet activated potential. As Garloff suggests, Benjamin’s method addresses itself to the ‘non-intentional layers of aesthetic constructs’, to the ‘poetic forms of works’, in order to unlock their historical content (2003: 14). Form here also becomes a way for Benjamin to distance himself from ‘the fiction of “hermeneutic continuity” that grounds understanding’ (2003: 15). His focus on form privileges symbolic meaning over intention, which, as Garloff argues, can be understood as a literary criticism committed to representation rather than explanation and interpretation. The latter in particular is an important and possibly all too often ignored aspect of Benjaminian literary criticism, which is not only a specific articulation of a method but also a clear account of the work of the critic: a critic does not explain or interpret the work; rather, she represents it (Garloff, 2003: 15). And it is via this latter operation that we can understand what Benjamin has in mind when he insists on understanding literary criticism as an active, creative procedure that activates and potentiates symbolic meaning that the work carries abstractly. As in Adorno, the literary artwork needs the literary critic for its continued existence and to live its life fully and continuously.
Literary criticism in the twenty-first century has seen a renewed investment in the fundamental questions of the discipline, in particular since literary criticism and theory, once again, finds itself in a moment of deep crisis. The question of what literary criticism might look like in the twenty-first century often involves questioning basic assumptions about reading, interpretation, the status of the work of art, and the kind of work that criticism ought to be carrying out. The desire to probe the foundations of the discipline is so strong that in 2016, many critics have begun to discuss the possibility of a ‘post-critical era’. In such a climate, we are well served to remind ourselves of the literary critical method based upon critical theory. The account of the relation between the literary work and the work of critic, for instance, is as remarkable as it is relevant in a time in which literary criticism struggles to conceive of a stable ground upon which it may stand. Those persuaded by the logic of critical theory and the literary theory emerging out of the Frankfurt School may wish to revisit the fundamental methodological commitments of this practice in order to find hope in what elsewhere seem to be dark times for literary criticism. To be sure, declarations of crises in literary criticism and indeed crises of literature more generally are not new, and we encounter them with some regularity throughout history. The most recent version of such crises, however, may lack the positive aspects of previous moments of crisis, which re-shaped and renewed the literary critical landscape much like forest fires restore important nutrients to the soil and make it possible for new, more energetic life to grow and flourish. What we see in recent critical discourse all too frequently, however, is that frenzied attempts to determine what literary criticism may look like in the twenty-first century and how we may define its continued significance and function leave the larger capitalist re-shaping of the university system and of the cultural field unchallenged. The humanities are widely de-funded, and scholars of literature are pressed to defend their work and projects within increasingly market-oriented, instrumentalized parameters. In the context, it is not surprising that big-data approaches have become increasingly popular, since they produce broad, empirically grounded ‘readings’ of literary archives that also stand the chance of attracting substantial sums of external funding while training ‘student researchers’ in skills that are recognized by the contemporary economy. In such a situation, returning to critical theory’s famous critique of the instrumentalization of thought, culture, and critique may yield analyses and strategies that can allow us to formulate true futures for literary criticism that do not simply replicate pragmatic market utilitarianism.
Michael W. Jennings suggests that the special status of Benjamin as a literary critic lies in his engagement with critical theory, however fraught with disagreements and tensions:
The conviction that the work of art must be accorded a privileged status due to its function as the residence of truth in the world lends to Benjamin’s career a purpose and tenor we do not ordinarily associate with that of a literary critic. This juxtaposition of epistemological and literary critical interests has led Anglo-American readers in particular to misunderstand the character of Benjamin’s work; he is neither precisely a philosopher, nor exactly a literary essayist.… Each of his literary essays describes a philosophy of its object. His career might be said to represent the protracted attempt to articulate the manner in which literature in general and specific works in particular hold within them the key to man’s understanding of the world and the absolute, and to describe a literary critical method adequate to the recognition and revelation of that truth. (1983: 549)
This, in itself always dialectical, approach to literature allows Benjamin to foreground the important oppositional function of literature in the context of a general immanent criticism of the existing that creates the preconditions for its transcendence. And it is here that we can point toward another important methodological commonality between Benjamin and Adorno, one which fuses an immanent criticism of literature with a theory of the literary work’s important function. The literary work here is understood as a practical implementation of immanent criticism, a notion of praxis that, as we have seen, emerges out of the dialectical relation between the work of literature and the work of the critic. ‘The social interpretation of lyric poetry as of all works of art’, Adorno writes, ‘may not focus directly on the so-called social perspective or the social interests of the works or their authors’ (1991b: 38). ‘Instead’, he continues, ‘it must discover how the entirety of a society, conceived as an internally contradictory unit, is manifested in the work of art, in what way the work of art remains subject to society and in what way it transcends it. In philosophical terms, the approach must be an immanent one’ (1991b: 38–9). Thus, as for Benjamin, the oppositional character of the literary work is a matter of both its immanent engagement with the limits of the existing and its refusal of pure immediacy: ‘the work’s distance from mere existence becomes a measure of what is false and bad in the latter. In its protest the poem expresses the dream of a world in which things would be different’ (1991b: 39–40). The lyric’s opposition therefore lies in its formal resistance to ‘the reification of the world’ (1991b: 40).
We may conclude by once again foregrounding the centrality of the category of form and of the focus on immanent criticism, the specificity of media, and the oppositional, historically and medially specific character of the literary artwork by turning to the limits of precisely this methodological approach which are helpfully probed and ultimately reaffirmed in the work of Leo Löwenthal. In a retrospective essay in which he evaluates his own contribution to literary criticism, Löwenthal lays out for us why his work may be important for the sociological study of literature but why we may not be able to speak of it as committed to developing or advancing a method for or particular kind of literary criticism like Adorno and Benjamin. Looking back over his early writings, Löwenthal writes:
while I in no way feel ashamed of these documents of my youth, I am conscious of their weaknesses. If I were to write them over again, I would certainly be less sure of some of the direct connections I drew between literature and writers on the one hand, and the social infrastructure on the other. (1987: 3)
But unlike Adorno and Benjamin, whose work is driven by the recognition of the lack of attention to the precise ways in which literature may be brought into relation with social and material reality, a recognition that ultimately underwrites the development of a specific method formulated in keeping with the logic of critical theory, Löwenthal remains far less interested in that which lies between the two areas in which he is interested and that he wishes to bring into relation: literature and society. Accordingly, he observes: ‘the writings of my contemporaries have often amazed me because some … are so concerned with “mediation” that the connections between social being and social consciousness became almost obscured’ (1987: 3). Yet, what Löwenthal discusses as excessive obscurity or ‘unnecessarily complicated and esoteric language’ is, as we have seen, the very commitment that allowed Adorno and Benjamin to formulate a theory of literature and literary criticism in relation to critical theory. Moreover, it is also what makes the relation between literary criticism and critical theory in their work a dialectical one insofar as their examination of precisely that which lies between, of the forces and forms of mediation, allows them to further develop critical theory as an overarching system of thought and critique. To Löwenthal by contrast, critical theory means, as he stresses, ‘a perspective’ and this is, of course, fundamentally different than what it means for Adorno and Benjamin: a method. However, this suggestion should not be taken to mean that this is simply a failure or shortcoming in Löwenthal’s work. After all, he is very much aware of the shortcomings of his approach to literature. He defends his approach, however, on the grounds of political and historical necessity. Still, he concedes that his work, at times ‘behavioristic, that is, unhistorical’, did not change the fact that ‘sociology of literature in the sense of an analysis of art remains suspect’ (1987: 4). ‘I sense today in Europe an inclination to perceive a work of art merely as a manifestation of ideology’, he continues,
which strips it of its specific integrity, that is, its historically conditioned but also rationally creative cognitive role. To put it in a more provocative form: Marxist literary criticism is not only totally adequate but indispensable in the analysis of mass culture. However, it must be applied with utter caution to art itself and must, as a critique of social illusions, limit itself to the residues which are unequivocally ideological in nature. (1987: 4–5)
Löwenthal himself therefore foregrounds the shortcoming of some of this work and thereby reaffirms precisely some of the fundamental commitments that inform the method that Adorno and Benjamin develop in more detail elsewhere. It is, to put it bluntly, a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ type of moment in Löwenthal’s essay that is as charmingly honest as it is logically illuminating.
By way of closing this chapter, it is worth foregrounding Löwenthal’s account of a sociology of art that, he stresses, must be set apart from a sociology of mass culture, although the latter is the main focus of his work. In this distinction between mass culture and art and in the insistence on the importance of the latter, we can see not only a set of principles that connect Löwenthal’s method back to that elaborated in much more detail by Adorno and Benjamin, but it also serves as a reminder of some of the fundamental aspects of a literary theory and a literary criticism that is developed in concert with critical theory.
‘Adorno once said: “Works of art … have their greatness only insofar as they let speak what ideology conceals. They transcend, whether they want to or not, false consciousness”’ (Löwenthal, 1987: 5). The consequence of this suggestion, Löwenthal argues, is important. It means that, crucially, ‘literature is not ideology’. All too often, critical theory is taken to be similar to if not congruent with ideology critique, in part because the latter has become one of the stock operations of left-leaning literary criticism. But, Löwenthal argues, this is not what a literary critical approach based on critical theory would pursue: ‘we are not engaged in research on ideology; rather, we have to focus our attention on the special truth … which the literary work imparts’ (1987: 5).
What this means, Löwenthal suggests, is not only that this critical method assumes that literature makes legible that which ideology confines to unreadability but also that we must examine literature’s particular role as artistic medium in this context. What a literary critical approach based on critical theory does with literature is, therefore, dialectically connected to what it believes literature is and does – it departs from a specific theory of literature, one that is connected to a philosophical focus on epistemology and politics. ‘Literature’, Löwenthal continues, ‘is the only dependable source for human consciousness and self-consciousness, for the individual’s relationship to the world as experience’ (1987: 5). As a consequence, Löwenthal, like Adorno and Benjamin, rejects any sociological criticism of literature that simply mines the literary work for sociological evidence. ‘Literature is no mere quarry’, Löwenthal writes. He continues, ‘I reject all attempts to regard literature as a tool to learn data and facts about institutions such as the economy, the state, and the legal system. Social scientists and social historians should be forbidden from regarding literature as a source for raw materials’ (1987: 6). To do so, Löwenthal argues, would be to miss literature’s true ontology and function: ‘literature teaches us to understand the success or failure of socialization of individuals in concrete historical moments and situations’ (1987: 6). This suggestion surely has continued relevance today, if only as a note of caution, since so many of our current literary critical approaches are in some form indebted to a sociological critique of literature. In his words of caution, we also find a reminder that although critical theory is aimed at a critique of society and culture it must not simply be conflated with overly sociological approaches to culture and art. Rather, the core of the method and of its literary criticism is to treat art and literature on their own terms, developing a clear theory of literature from which a criticism departs that is aimed at analyzing first and foremost matters of form, medium, and history.
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