Technical problems in art can be analyzed as encoded reactions to social problems.

Evidence

It was a student of Emil Staiger’s Peter Szondi, influenced by Hegel’s Aesthetics, Lukács’s essay on `The Sociology of Modern Drama’ and Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music, who demonstrated in his Theory of Modern Drama (1956) howeven without a theological and messianic point of viewan analysis of the dialectic of form and content in individual works was able to show that the treatment of technical problems within works represented at the same time a reaction to social problems. … In sample analyses of plays from Ibsen to Arthur Miller, Szondi, then twenty-five years old, showed how the contradiction between dramatic form and epic subject-matter and between a frame based on dialogic communication and the growing problem of the isolation of individuals ultimately led to a new principle of form in drama. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 552

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the dialectic of form and content as a method: formal/technical crises inside works register social crises.
• XREF: Chains Hegel’s Aesthetics, Lukács’s drama sociology, and Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music into one genealogy. — connects to: Works should embody social problems internally rather than stare at society in horror — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 152; Art works expose social contradictions through their internal formal tensions — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 19; The rationality of art grows as society’s irrationality grows — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 832 (+7 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: how mid-century formalist criticism smuggled social theory in through the back door of ‘technical problems.’
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Works should embody social problems internally rather than stare at society in horror — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 152; Art works expose social contradictions through their internal formal tensions — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 19; The rationality of art grows as society’s irrationality grows — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 832 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Formal technical problems in drama mirror social problems of isolation #exemplifies (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2237
• Literary works generate the very situations they also react against #complicates (0.76) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1786