CSCA Book Launch: Peter Weiss' The Aesthetics of Resistance Vol.III
To mark the long-awaited English translation of the final volume of The Aesthetics of Resistance, the CSCA will hold a screening and discussion between the novel’s English translator Joel Scott and Prof. Frederic Schwartz (UCL History of Art). The event will consist of a screening of the film On Display: Peter Weiss (44 mins, 1979) by Harun Farocki, produced as Weiss worked on the third volume, followed by an informal discussion. Organised by Daniel Ward.
CSCA Book Launch: Peter Weiss' The Aesthetics of Resistance Vol.III
24 Jun 2025, 17:30 – 20:00
A major literary event, the publication of Peter Weiss’s monumental three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance makes one of the towering works of twentieth-century German literature available to English-speaking readers for the first time. The crowning achievement of Peter Weiss—the internationally renowned writer best known for his play Marat/Sade—The Aesthetics of Resistance spans the period from the late 1930s to the end of World War II, dramatizing antifascist resistance and the rise and fall of proletarian political parties in Europe.
Published between 1975 and 1981, the trilogy follows an unnamed narrator and his peers—sixteen- and seventeen-year-old working-class students—as they explore the affinity between political resistance and art while fighting fascist regimes in Germany and Spain. Throughout this epic work, Weiss suggests that meaning lies in embracing resistance, no matter how intense the oppression, and that we must look to art for new models of political action and social understanding. The Aesthetics of Resistance is one of the truly great examples of postwar German literature and an essential resource for understanding twentieth-century German history.
Poet and Translator
Joel Scott is a poet and translator from Sydney, Australia with a PhD in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies from Macquarie University. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Bildverbot and Diary Farm. His translation of the second volume of Peter Weiss’s magnum opus Die Ästhetik des Widerstands was published by Duke University Press in 2020, and received an honourable mention in the 2020 Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work.
Frederic J. Schwartz is Emeritus Professor of History of Art at University College London. His books include The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War and Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany.