The Frankfurt School and Poetics is a study of the poetic dimensions of Critical Theory. By drawing this dimension out from under the long shadow of Theodor Adorno’s verdict that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, this collection of essays shows how deeply poetics, understood as both the theory of poetic form and a mode of formal thinking, shaped and was shaped by Frankfurt School’s first generation. Bringing together established and emerging scholars, the book traces these poetics through the work of Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Löwenthal, Marcuse, and Kracauer, alongside a comparative and transhistorical range of literary texts, from Homer to Anne Waldman. Across these studies, the volume presents poetics as foundational to Critical Theory’s method and formation. Featuring an afterword by Martin Jay, The Frankfurt School and Poetics offers scholars and advanced students in philosophy, critical theory, German studies, and comparative literature a substantial reassessment of how the Frankfurt School thought with, and through, poetry and poetics, and makes the case that this thinking remains urgent for understanding poetry’s critical potential today.

Lukas Hoffman is an independent researcher and academic editor who resides in Berlin. His work on poetics and critical theory has appeared in New German Critique, German Life and Letters, and Monatshefte.

George Kovalenko is a Lecturer in the Department of English at Stony Brook University. His work has appeared in New German Critique, Poetics Today, and The Wallace Stevens Journal. He is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Marxist Literary Theory.