Conversations with Martin Jay

• Published in: Journal of comparative literature & aesthetics 2019-09, Vol.42 (2), p.1-9
• Main Author: Gordon, Peter E
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Ambiguity; Bibliographic literature; Biography; Critical theory; Dialectics; Digital archives; Dissertations & theses; Historians; Ideology; Intellectuals; Interviews; Jay, Martin; Learning; Literary devices; Marxism; Modernism; Narrative techniques; Palimpsests; Poststructuralism; Social research; Source materials; Theory
• ISSN: 0252-8169

What is striking is the steep learning curve that confronted Americans who tried to make sense of the new and challenging ideas that were coming from Western Marxism in general and the Frankfurt School in particular. Because of Hughes' interest in the intellectual migration as a whole-he was preparing a book to be called The Sea Change on it, which appeared in 1975-and the fact that many its members were still alive and willing to talk, the opportunity to write a history of the Frankfurt School was apparent. [...]because I was coming to the project without a strong ideological investment in the theory or indebted to its surviving figures as my personal teachers, I could assume a dispassionate and objective stance. [...]all in all, the book that resulted from the dissertation seems to have survived its inadequacies and continues to introduce the Frankfurt School to new readers around the world. 2.Following your 1973 study of the Frankfurt School, and the next two major books, Marxism and Totality and Adorno (both published in 1984), your work underwent a certain shift and you turned to the question of vision, as demonstrated in the 1993 book, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought.