Introduction: Peter Weiss and The Aesthetics of Resistance

Abstract

In this introduction the editors first trace the reception of Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance in (West) Germany and the United States. Focusing on the relation between politics and aesthetics, some critics characterized this relation as fraught, arguing that the novel’s supposedly outdated politics ultimately rendered it obsolete. Others approached the novel as a writing experiment articulating politics and aesthetics in tense but productive ways. Proceeding and departing from these established views of Weiss’s text, the editors then propose a reading that understands the novel as deliberately opening itself up to future readings, a text conceived and structured to engage readers of not-yet-determined futures.