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walter benjamin berlin childhood: Berlin Childhood Around 1900 Walter Benjamin, 2006 Begun in Poveromo, Italy, in 1932, and extensively revised in 1938, Berlin Childhood around 1900 remained unpublished during Walter Benjamin's lifetime, one of his large-scale defeats. Now translated into English for the first time in book form, on the basis of the recently discovered final version that contains the author's own arrangement of a suite of luminous vignettes, it can be more widely appreciated as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century prose writing. Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Benjamin's recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin's West End at the turn of the century becomes an occasion for unified expeditions into the depths of memory. In this diagram of his life, Benjamin focuses not on persons or events but on places and things, all seen from the perspective of a child--a collector, flâneur, and allegorist in one. This book is also one of Benjamin's great city texts, bringing to life the cocoon of his childhood--the parks, streets, schoolrooms, and interiors of an emerging metropolis. It reads the city as palimpsest and labyrinth, revealing unexpected lyricism in the heart of the familiar. As an added gem, a preface by Howard Eiland discusses the genesis and structure of the work, which marks the culmination of Benjamin's attempt to do philosophy concretely. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Berlin Childhood around 1900 Walter Benjamin, 2025-11-18 A new translation of philsopher Walter Benjamin's moving and groundbreaking memoir of growing up. Completed in exile in Paris, as the second World War was dawning, Walter Benjamin looks back at the city of his birth at the beginning of the century. The book is both a sensory memoir of childhood as well as a tour of the iconic spaces of city. These are 'expeditions into the depths of memory', moving through vignettes of domestic settings and classrooms, city squares, parks and streets. The memories of childhood merge with a city that is about to disappear into darkness. As his friend, Adorno, wrote, the work is 'illuminated by lightning flashes of immediate remembrance . . .the images this book unearths and brings strangely near are not idyllic and not contemplative. Over them lies the shadow of the Third Reich. And through them dreamily runs a shudder at the long forgotten.' |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: The "Berlin Chronicle" Notices Walter Benjamin, 2015 A companion volume to Walter Benjamin's (1892-1940) memoir Berlin Childhood circa 1900, The Berlin Chronicle Notices is now in a new translation by Carl Skoggard. The German-Jewish philosopher, theorist and critic Walter Benjamin began to ruminate on his comfortable Berlin childhood in 1932, not long before he would flee Germany for good to escape the Nazis. The resulting Berlin Chronicle notices--40 in all--do not result in a linear narrative but instead remain fragmentary recollections of Benjamin's young years, from his early childhood to the threshold of adulthood. More generally, they are a series of profound explorations of memory and of the ways memory relates to place. Rich in and of themselves, these notices greatly illuminate Berlin Childhood circa 1900, written by Benjamin months later. This translation, in a charming pocket-sized format, comes with an extensive commentary, a historical map of Berlin and numerous illustrations. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: The Storyteller Walter Benjamin, 2016-07-26 A beautiful collection of the legendary thinker’s short stories The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin. The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Attached to Dispossession: Sacrificial Narratives in Post-imperial Europe Vladimir Biti, 2017-12-18 After the First World War, East Central Europe underwent an extensive geopolitical reconfiguration, resulting in highly turbulent environments in which political sacrificial narratives found a breeding ground. They engaged various groups’ experiences of dispossession, energizing them for the wars against their ‘perpetrators’. By knitting together their frustrations and thus creating new foundational myths, these narratives introduced new imagined communities. Their mutual competition established a typically post-imperial traumatic constellation that generated discontent, frustrations and anxieties. Within the various constituencies that structured it through their interaction, this book focuses on literary narratives of dispossession, which, placed at its nodes, develop much subtler technologies than their political counterparts. They are interpreted as individual and clandestine oppositions to the homogenizing pattern of public narratives. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew Stuart Ross, 2011-04-01 A man reflects on family memories—that may or may not be true—in this novel of “sharply composed vignettes with a keen sense of timing and humor” (Publishers Weekly). Ben is an artist closing in on forty, and it’s hard for him to be sure about the past. His parents are both dead, and his brother, who has mental issues, is a lousy source of information. So when Ben finds himself with a particularly persistent memory that keeps nagging at him, he doesn’t know where to turn to answer the question: Did his mother really assassinate a prominent neo-Nazi? In a novel that “shows maturity of vision without sacrificing the childish sense of play and absurdity his readers expect from him,” Stuart Ross sends Ben ranging through childhood summers at an Ontario cottage, teenage alienation in a Toronto suburb, a disastrous college career, and the calamity that precipitates his brother’s institutionalization—as he tries to sort through the events of his life, both real and surreal (The Globe and Mail, Toronto). “A writer with an original sensibility.” —The Vancouver Sun |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography Gerhard Richter, 2000 Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography is not merely the most extensive and insightful treatment of Benjamin 's autobiographical writings. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Walter Benjamin for Children Jeffrey Mehlman, 1993-05-15 In Walter Benjamin for Children, readers will encounter a host of intertextual surprises: an evocation of the flooding of the Mississippi informed by the argument of The Task of the Translator; a discussion of scams in stamp-collecting that turns into The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; a tale of bootlegging in the American South that converges with the best of Benjamin's forays into fiction. Mehlman superimposes a dual series of texts dealing with catastrophe, on the one hand, and fraud, on the other, and allows it to resonate with the false-messianic theology of Sabbatianism as it came to focus the attention and enthusiasm of Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem during the same years. The radio scripts for children offer an unexpected byway, on the eve of apocalypse, into Benjamin's messianic preoccupations. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Walter Benjamin Bernd Witte, 1997 Expanded and revised, as well as translated, from the 1985 German edition, details the thought of Benjamin (1892-1940), an all-around European intellectual most active between the wars. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Walter Benjamin Momme Brodersen, 1996 Revised and updated for the English edition, this comprehensive biography provides an account of Benjamin's career, and demonstrates the fallacy of the popular, romanticized notion of his life as the sorrowful progression of a melancholic personality |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen Larry McMurtry, 2010-06-01 In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction, Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become. Using an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier. McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: One-Way Street and Other Writings Walter Benjamin, 2009-10-29 Walter Benjamin was one of the most original writers and thinkers of the 20th century. This new selection brings together Benjamin's major works, including 'One-Way Street', his dreamlike, aphoristic observations of urban life in Weimar Germany. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Radio Benjamin Walter Benjamin, 2021-12-07 Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to ’33, he wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers the surviving transcripts, which appear here for the first time in English. This eclectic collection demonstrates the range of Benjamin’s thinking and his enthusiasm for popular sensibilities. His celebrated “Enlightenment for Children” youth programs, his plays, readings, book reviews, and fiction reveal Benjamin in a creative, rather than critical, mode. They flesh out ideas elucidated in his essays, some of which are also represented here, where they cover topics as varied as getting a raise and the history of natural disasters, subjects chosen for broad appeal and examined with passion and acuity. Delightful and incisive, this is Walter Benjamin channeling his sophisticated thinking to a wide audience, allowing us to benefit from a new voice for one of the twentieth century’s most respected thinkers. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Illuminations Walter Benjamin, 1986 Walter Benjamin was one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century. Illuminations includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and Benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin's life in dark times. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Regarding Lost Time Katja Haustein, 2017-07-05 What is autobiography and how does it transform in the age of technological reproducibility? Katja Haustein discusses this question as it relates to photography and the role of emotion in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1909-22), Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1932-38), and Roland Barthes's Roland Barthes (1977) and Camera Lucida (1980). In her close critical readings, Haustein provides the first comprehensive comparative analysis of these popular works, mapping them against little-studied textual, visual and aural material, some of which has only recently become accessible. In this way, her book opens new avenues in scholarship dedicated to three outstanding twentieth-century writers and contributes to a field of critical inquiry that is still in the making: the history of autobiography in the light of a history of the gaze. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: A Philosophy of Tragedy Christopher Hamilton, 2016-04-15 A Philosophy of Tragedy explores the tragic condition of man in modernity. Nietzsche knew it, but so have countless characters in literature: that the modern age places us squarely before the reflection of our own tragic condition, our existence characterized by utmost contingency, homelessness, instability, unredeemed suffering, and broken morality. Christopher Hamilton examines the works of philosophers, writers, and playwrights to offer a stirring account of our tragic condition, one that explores the nature of philosophy and the ways it has understood itself and its role to mankind. Ranging from the debate over the death of the tragedy to a critique of modern virtue ethics, from a new interpretation of the evil of Auschwitz to a look at those who have seen our tragic state as inherently inconsolable, he shows that tragedy has been a crucial part of the modern human experience, one from which we shouldn’t avert our eyes. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: The Benjamin Files Fredric Jameson, 2022-03-22 Jameson’s first full-length engagement with Walter Benjamin’s work. The Benjamin Files offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer. What resulted was a coexistence or variety of language fields and thematic codes which overlapped and often seemed to contradict each other: a view which will allow us to clarify the much-debated tension in his works between the mystical or theological side of Benjamin and his political or historical inclination. The three-way tug of war over his heritage between adherents of his friends Scholem, Adorno and Brecht, can also be better grasped from this position, which gives the Brechtian standpoint more due than most influential academic studies. Benjamin’s corpus is an anticipation of contemporary theory in the priority it gives language and representation over philosophical or conceptual unity; and its political motivations are clarified by attention to the omnipresence of History throughout his writing, from the shortest articles to the most ambitious projects. His explicit program—“to transfer the crisis into the heart of language” or, in other words, to detect class struggle at work in the most minute literary phenomena—requires the reader to translate the linguistic or representational literary issues that concerned him back into the omnipresent but often only implicitly political ones. But the latter are those of another era, to which we must gain access, to use one of Benjamin’s favorite expressions. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Excavating Memory Ülker Gökberk, 2020 This book brings the Turkish writer Bilge Karasu (1930-1995) into a new critical spotlight by examining the author's poetics of memory, as laid out in his narratives on Istanbul's Beyoğlu. Gökberk contextualizes these posthumously published pieces in an approach informed by studies on memory, identity, place, and remembering as literary representation. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin, 1999 Focusing on the arcades of 19th-century Paris--glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources. 46 illustrations. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Walter Benjamin Walter Benjamin, 2013 A collection of fabricated essays, lectures and interviews, supposedly by Walter Benjamin. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Reflections Walter Benjamin, 2019-02-26 The towering twentieth century thinker delve into literature, philosophy, and his own life experience in this “extraordinary collection” (Publishers Weekly). A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin. Benjamin moves seamlessly from literary criticism to autobiography to philosophical-theological speculations, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest and most versatile writers of the twentieth century. “This book is just that: reflections of a highly polished mind that uncannily approximate the century’s fragments of shattered traditions.” —Time |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940 Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, 1992 The legendary correspondence between the critic Walter Benjamin and the historian Gershom Scholem bears indispensable witness to the inner lives of two remarkable and enigmatic personalities. Benjamin, acknowledged today as one of the leading literary and social critics of his day, was known during his lifetime by only a small circle of his friends and intellectual confreres. Scholem recognized the genius of his friend and mentor during their student days in Berlin, and the two began to correspond after Scholem's emigration to Palestine. Their impassioned exchange draws the reader into the very heart of their complex relationship during the anguished years from 1932 until Benjamin's death in 1940. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: One-Way Street Walter Benjamin, 2021-07-20 A classic collection of Walter Benjamin's essays, including some of his most celebrated writing Walter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic intellectual figures of this century. Not only was he a thinker who made an enormous impact with his critical and philosophical writings, he shattered disciplinary and stylistic conventions. This collection, introduced by Susan Sontag, contains the most representative and illuminating selection of his work over a twenty-year period, and thus does full justice to the richness and the multi-dimensional nature of his thought. Included in these pages are aphorisms and townscapes, esoteric meditation and reminiscences of childhood, and reflections on language, psychology, aesthetics and politics. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: The Dialectics of Seeing Susan Buck-Morss, 1991-07-01 Walter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose materialist metaphysics he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century ur-form of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time—from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons—as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south—Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples—and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of dialectics at a standstill. She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of afterimages to have the last word. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Body-and Image-Space Sigrid Weigel, 2003-12-16 The last decade has seen a new wave of interest in philosophical and theoretical circles in the writings of Walter Benjamin. In Body-and Image-Space Sigrid Weigel, one of Germany's leading feminist theorists and a renowned commentator on the work of Walter Benjamin, argues that the reception of his work has so far overlooked a crucial aspect of his thought - his use of images. Weigel shows that it is precisely his practice of thinking in images that holds the key to understanding the full complexity, richness and topicality of Benjamin's theory. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Walking in Berlin Franz Hessel, 2020-12-08 The first English translation of a lost classic that reinvents the flaneur in Berlin. Franz Hessel (1880–1941), a German-born writer, grew up in Berlin, studied in Munich, and then lived in Paris, where he moved in artistic and literary circles. His relationship with the fashion journalist Helen Grund was the inspiration for Henri-Pierre Roche's novel Jules et Jim (made into a celebrated 1962 film by Francois Truffaut). In collaboration with Walter Benjamin, Hessel reinvented the Parisian figure of the flaneur. This 1929 book—here in its first English translation—offers Hessel's version of a flaneur in Berlin. In Walking in Berlin, Hessel captures the rhythm of Weimar-era Berlin, recording the seismic shifts in German culture. Nearly all of the essays take the form of a walk or outing, focusing on either a theme or part of the city, and many end at a theater, cinema, or club. Hessel deftly weaves the past with the present, walking through the city's history as well as its neighborhoods. Even today, his walks in the city, from the Alexanderplatz to Kreuzberg, can guide would-be flaneurs. Walking in Berlin is a lost classic, known mainly because of Hessel's connection to Benjamin but now introduced to readers of English. Walking in Berlin was a central model for Benjamin's Arcades Project and remains a classic of “walking literature” that ranges from Surrealist perambulation to Situationist “psychogeography.” This MIT Press edition includes the complete text in translation as well as Benjamin's essay on Walking in Berlin, originally written as a review of the book's original edition. “An absolutely epic book, a walking remembrance.” —Walter Benjamin |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Walter Benjamin Esther Leslie, 2007 Drawing upon a wealth of journal writings and personal correspondence, Esther Leslie presents a uniquely intimate portrait of one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin. She sets his life in the context of his middle-class upbringing; explores the social, political, and economic upheaval in Germany during and after World War I; and recounts Benjamin’s eccentric love of toys, trick-books, travel, and ships. From the Frankfurt School and his influential friendships with Theodore Adorno, Gershom Scholem, and Bertolt Brecht, to his travels across Europe, Walter Benjamin traces out the roots of Benjamin’s groundbreaking writings and their far-reaching impact in his own time. Leslie argues that Benjamin’s life challenges the stereotypical narrative of the tragic and lonely intellectual figure—instead positioning him as a man who relished the fierce combat of competing theories and ideas. Closing with his death at the Spanish-French border in a desperate flight from the Nazis and Stalin, Walter Benjamin is a concise and concentrated account of a capacious intellect trapped by hostile circumstances. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Under the Sign of Saturn Susan Sontag, 2013-05-16 Susan Sontag's third essay collection brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980. In these provocative and hugely influential works she explores some of the most controversial artists and thinkers of our time, including her now-famous polemic against Hitler's favourite film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, and the cult of fascist art, as well as a dazzling analysis of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany. There are also highly personal and powerful explorations of death, art, language, history, the imagination and writing itself. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: The Writer of Modern Life Walter Benjamin, 2006 In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity Andrew E. Benjamin, Charles Rice, 2009 In what ways are Walter Benjamin's writings centrally caught up with architectural concerns, from the redevelopment of major urban centres to the movements that individuals can make within the new spaces of modern cities? This volume collects essays on time in cinema, the problem of kitsch, the design of graves and tombs, and more. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Walter Benjamin Graeme Gilloch, 2002-02-01 The works of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) are widely acclaimed as being among the most original and provocative writings of twentieth-century critical thought, and have become required reading for scholars and students in a range of academic disciplines. This book provides a lucid introduction to Benjamin's oeuvre through a close and sensitive reading not only of his major studies, but also of some of his less familiar essays and fragments. Gilloch offers an original interpretation of, and fresh insights into, the continuities between Benjamin's always demanding and seemingly disparate texts. Gilloch's book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in social theory, literary theory, cultural and media studies and urban studies who are seeking a sophisticated yet readable overview of Benjamin's work. It will also prove rewarding reading for those already well-versed in Benjaminian thought. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Berlin for Jews Leonard Barkan, 2016-11-04 Intro -- Contents -- Prologue: Me and Berlin -- 1. Places: Schönhauser Allee -- 2. Places: Bayerisches Viertel -- 3. People: Rahel Varnhagen -- 4. People: James Simon -- 5. People: Walter Benjamin -- Epilogue: Recollections, Reconstructions -- Acknowledgments -- Suggestions for Further Reading. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: The Beach at Night Elena Ferrante, 2016-11-01 A “beautifully written” dark fable from a doll’s point of view—by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Lost Daughter and the Neapolitan Novels (The Washington Post). One of NPR’s Best Books of the Year. Readers of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter may recall the little doll—lost or stolen—around which that novel revolves. Here, Ferrante retells the tale from the doll’s perspective. Celina is having a terrible night, one full of jealousy for the new kitten, Minù; feelings of abandonment and sadness; misadventures at the hands of the beach attendant; and dark dreams. But she will be happily found by Mati, her child, once the sun rises . . . “Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it.” —The Boston Globe |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Walter Benjamin Richard Wolin, 2023-09-01 Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin's widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses the unfinished Arcades Project, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamin's work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity. Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offerin |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: The Messianic Reduction Peter Fenves, 2011 The Messianic Reduction is the first study of Benjamin's early philosophy that takes into consideration the full range of his work, with particular emphasis on its complex relation to phenomenology, Kant and neo-Kantianism, and certain developments in mathematics. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition John McCole, 2018-08-06 Few modern thinkers have been as convinced of the necessity of recovering the past in order to redeem the present as Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Benjamin at once mourned and celebrated what he took to be an inevitable liquidation of traditional culture, and his determination to think both of these attitudes through to their conclusions lends his work its peculiar honesty, along with its paradoxical, antinomial coherence. In a landmark interpretation of the whole of Benjamin's career, John McCole demonstrates a way of understanding Benjamin that both contextualizes and addresses the complexities and ambiguities of his texts. Working with Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the intellectual field, McCole traces Benjamin's deep ambivalence about cultural tradition through the longterm project-an immanent critique of German idealist and romantic aesthetics-which unites his writings. McCole builds a sustained reading of Benjamin's intellectual development which sheds new light on the formative role of early influences—particularly his participation in the pre-World War I German youth movement and the orthodox discourse of German intellectual culture—and shows how Benjamin later extended the strategies he learned within these contexts during key encounters with Weimar modernism, surrealism, and the fiction of Proust. The fullest account of Benjamin available in English, this lucid and penetrating book will be welcomed by intellectual historians, literary theorists and critics, historians of German literature, and Continental philosophers. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Melancholy Dialectics Max Pensky, 1993 In recent years the German-Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin has come to be regarded as one of the leading intellectual figures of the 20th century. Yet much of his work, particularly his theoretical writing, remains elusive. |
walter benjamin berlin childhood: Unpacking My Library Walter Benjamin, 2022-08 I fully realize that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type. Nothing is further from my mind than to shake either your conviction or your distrust. Walter Benjamin was one of the great cultural critics of the twentieth century. In Unpacking My Library he offers a strikingly personal meditation on his career as a book collector and on the strange relations that spring up between objects and their owners. Witty, erudite and often moving, this book will resonate with bibliophiles of all kinds. Eris Gems make available in the form of beautifully produced saddle-stitched booklets a series of outstanding short works of fiction and non-fiction. |
Walter
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