Maps and Mirrors

The essays in this collection explore the links and gaps between the aesthetic and the political at the intersection of philosophy and literature. They do so by interrogating some of the major voices of aesthetic and literary theory, raising important questions about the implicit political contexts and commitments of thinkers from Kant to de Man. "Political", as it is used here, points not to positions on the political spectrum but to the ways that a critic or thinker, explicitly or implicitly, says something about the good and the just. Addressing the work of figures from Adorno and Lukacs to Heidegger and Gadamer, each essayist adopts a different perspective on the ideological structures that inform the language of the text being studied.