SOURCE: Harding, James Martin. “Integrating Atomization: Adorno Reading Berg Reading Büchner.” Theatre Journal 44, no. 1 (March 1992): 1-13.

In the following essay, Harding presents a complex analysis of the aesthetic and social categories associated with materialist criticism of Büchner's Woyzeck, arguing that the drama resists a teleological interpretation of class conflict and is instead concerned with atomization and social fractionalization.

Roughly a year before his death in 1969, Theodor W. Adorno published a short work entitled Alban Berg: Der Meister des Kleinsten Übergangs.¹ The text could be considered marginal were it not for the substantial personal influence that Berg had on the young Adorno, and for the prominent position Berg occupies in Adorno's later writings on music and aesthetics. The text is also of interest because it contains the last link in a chain of readings that leads back to Georg Büchner's dramatic account of Johann Christian Woyzeck...