/lit/ - Literature

>>20590602
Babar

>>20590602
None, all authors are midwits.

>>20590602
Certainly not Wagner.

dorno excoriates the proto-fascist Wagner in this series of essays on different aspects of the ultra-nationalist composer's oeuvre, or "Gesamtkunstwerken." He highlights Wagner's anti-Semitism, racialist thinking, and bourgeois apologism and nihilism, as reflected especially in the Götterdämmerung (The Twilight or Fall of the Gods), the conclusion to The Ring cycle. The Ring itself, of course, has a fundamentally anti-Semitic and Aryanist plot. Besides this, Adorno charges Wagner with reifying oppression by framing the pseudo-revolutionary struggle as a medievalist "myth," rather than one that would resist capitalism, racism, patriarchy, the State, etc. It's intriguing, though, that Wagner's Ring, at the end of Siegfried (part II), has what could be called a national-anarchist or -socialist message, in terms of Siegfried's destruction of the forces symbolizing capitalism (i.e., Jewish caricatures), the State (the dragon Fafner), & religion (the gods, particularly Wotan/Odin). This presentation was very likely informed by Wagner's "participation" in the 1849 uprising in Dresden alongside Bakunin ("participation," as Adorno writes, because at first he reportedly denied the charge of having participated in the revolt to save his life, and then considering that Wagnerian scholarship had systematically distorted the record on this [according to Adorno]). It's clear that Wagner was a fraud and a dilettante, as well as a repulsive white-supremacist and proto-Nazi.

>>20590602
I like Ayn Rand's younger body of work. I think she had a couple of firm intellectual endowments

>>20590602
PBUH

>For example, the English poet Lord Byron (1788–1824) seems to have a great brain, not only due to the quality witnessed by his writings but also, given his enormous brain, weighing 2.238 kg.