This new introduction to the Critical Theory’s history of thought and knowledge stresses its orientation to literature and literary models as well as its own literariness. It contains 27 essays, some of substantial length, as well as shorter commentaries on Ernst Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Auerbach, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, Hans Mayer and Peter Szondi. The authors, scholars in literary, cultural and historical studies, underscore not only the individual differences among the Jewish scientists, scholars and intellectuals mentioned, and the distances and differences in content among their individual works, but also explore their shared methods and procedures, examining those aspects of their self-identity that can be characterized by a universal orientation to text and writing. Through this prism, contours emerge of an epistemic history of Critical Theory in the 20th century, its perspective on the form of thought, text and canon, writing and the word. The volume looks at the way Critical Theory gave rise to certain ‘schools’ of thought but also takes into account predecessors and successors, critics and thinkers who were associated only for a time or on the periphery. Central here is a method of modern literary thought that can be designated by the concept ‘textual erudition,’ which cannot be separated from the actual thinkers, the ‘textual scholars.’ The essays revolve around intuitive and consciously cultivated distinctive features of reading, writing style and argumentative figures and the respective relation of the ‘textual scholars’ described here to language, word, writing and text. In this way, the volume illuminates its epistemologically oriented concepts of commentary and criticism, hermeneutics and knowledge as whole.weiterlesen