Lyric's Constellation, Poetry's Radical Privilege

Abstract

Robert Kaufman (Stanford University) challenges trends in recent criticism that have tended to present and apply Walter Benjamin's and Theodor Adorno's theories and practices of the constellation and force-field as if these last stemmed primarily from interventionist Left critique of the aesthetic and the literary. Kaufman's essay “Lyric's Constellation, Poetry's Radical Privilege” shows that on the contrary, Benjamin and Adorno - while certainly holding no brief for “pure” formalist methodology - actually develop the constellation and force-field in urgent response to a kind of Left criticism that sloganeeringly maintains that works of art and culture are historically and sociopolitically determined.