Adorno regarded Beckett and Celan as heirs of heroic modernism, not contemporaries of it.

Evidence

Beckett and Celan, the only contemporary artists whom Adorno acknowledged without reservation, with their indulgent inclusion of the rudiments of the older forms they were negating, and with the density of their texts that was increased by the inclusion of what had formerly been suppressed, werein terms of Adorno’s own standards in the philosophy of historynot, as artists, contemporaries of Adorno himself but of Schoenberg, Picasso and Joyce, contemporaries of heroic modernism. Adorno’s real contemporaries were presented as more advanced and poorer, and he had nothing more to say about them than that they lacked the richness of the Beckettian atom, or that art really did seem to have come to an end in them, although they must persistently continue it. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2727

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s late aesthetic theory and the idea of art ‘at an end’ — parallels discussions of the end of art in critical theory literature. — connects to: Adorno saw Beckett and Helms as surpassing Kafka and Joyce. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2238; Adorno linked Beckett’s greatness to the late style of earlier masters — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2722
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2727

Broader Connections

• Adorno linked Beckett’s greatness to the late style of earlier masters #complicates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2722