Monday, November 14, 2011

Pensky, Max. Review of Michael J. Thompson, ed. GEORG LUKACS RECONSIDERED. NDPR (November 2011).

Thompson, Michael J., ed.  Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics. London: Continuum, 2011.

This anthology of essays on Georg Lukács (1885-1971) counts as part of a current wave of secondary literature on the Hungarian Marxist theorist, philosopher and literary critic. Lukács' work and intellectual legacy, always complex and provocative, have in fact never wanted for attention, but in the past few years new impetus for re-engaging with his work has come from literary studies, where his theory of literary realism and his implacable opposition to literary modernism in all its forms resonate with neo-realist aesthetics, and from social and political theory, where Axel Honneth's recent re-appropriation of the central concept of reification has initiated a renewed critical conversation on just what Lukács did and did not mean by reification, and how well the concept might survive transplantation into theoretical climates far different than Lukács' own.  "Reconsideration" (an earlier anthology, by Lukács' Hungarian students, opted to "revalue" him) is therefore an apt expression. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/27375-georg-lukcs-reconsidered-critical-essays-in-politics-philosophy-and-aesthetics/

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