In Benjamin’s Library, Jane O. Newman offers, for the first time in any language, a reading of Walter Benjamin’s notoriously opaque work, Origin of the German Tragic Drama that systematically attends ...to its place in discussions of the Baroque in Benjamin’s day. Taking into account the literary and cultural contexts of Benjamin’s work, Newman recovers Benjamin’s relationship to the ideologically loaded readings of the literature and political theory of the seventeenth-century Baroque that abounded in Germany during the political and economic crises of the Weimar years.
To date, the significance of the Baroque for Origin of the German Tragic Drama has been glossed over by students of Benjamin, most of whom have neither read it in this context nor engaged with the often incongruous debates about the period that filled both academic and popular texts in the years leading up to and following World War I. Armed with extraordinary historical, bibliographical, philological, and orthographic research, Newman shows the extent to which Benjamin participated in these debates by reconstructing the literal and figurative history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books that Benjamin analyzes and the literary, art historical and art theoretical, and political theological discussions of the Baroque with which he was familiar. In so doing, she challenges the exceptionalist, even hagiographic, approaches that have become common in Benjamin studies. The result is a deeply learned book that will infuse much-needed life into the study of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.
This book provides a highly original approach to the writings of the twentieth-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin by one of his most distinguished readers. It develops the idea of 'working ...with' Benjamin, seeking both to read his corpus and to put it to work - to show how a reading of Benjamin can open up issues that may not themselves be immediately at stake in his texts. The defining elements in Benjamin's writings that Andrew Benjamin isolates - history, experience, translation, technical reproducibility and politics - are put to work; that is, their utility is established in engaging the works of others. The question is how utility is understood. As Andrew Benjamin argues, utility involves demonstrating the different ways in which Benjamin is a central thinker within the project of understanding the nature of modernity. This is best achieved by noting connections and points of differentiation between his work and the writings of Adorno and Heidegger. However, the more demanding project is that 'working with' Benjamin necessitates deploying the implicit assumptions within his writings as well as demanding of his formulations more than is provided by their initial presentation. What is at stake is not the application of Benjamin's thought. Rather what counts is its use.Working with Benjamin engages with the themes central to Benjamin's work with deftness, daring and critical insight while at the same time situating those themes within current academic and cultural debates.
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.
Cinema and experience Hansen, Miriam Bratu; Dimendberg, Edward
2011., 20110904, 2011, c2012., 2011-10-04, Volume:
44
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Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno—affiliated through friendship, professional ties, and argument—developed an astute philosophical critique of modernity in which ...technological media played a key role. This book explores in depth their reflections on cinema and photography from the Weimar period up to the 1960s. Miriam Bratu Hansen brings to life an impressive archive of known and, in the case of Kracauer, less known materials and reveals surprising perspectives on canonic texts, including Benjamin's artwork essay. Her lucid analysis extrapolates from these writings the contours of a theory of cinema and experience that speaks to questions being posed anew as moving image culture evolves in response to digital technology.
Walter Benjamin, dont la stature philosophique est unanimement célébrée, ne mérite-t-il pas aussi d’être pleinement reconnu en tant qu’écrivain ? Son œuvre, au confluent de la philosophie, de la ...critique et de la création littéraire, en appelle à une approche elle- même pluridisciplinaire, que ce volume entend mettre en œuvre. Parmi les traits qui caractérisent l’écriture de Benjamin, l’usage d’images originales – métaphores, allégories, symboles – et de ce qu’il nomme les « images de pensée » tranche avec un certain canon de l’écriture philosophique. Or, si la pensée benjaminienne de l’image visuelle a été souvent commentée, son usage des images textuelles, littéraires ou philosophiques, l’est beaucoup moins. Suggestives et stimulantes, elliptiques et hermétiques, ces images s’inscrivent dans une dynamique de renouvellement de la pensée critique en libérant la dimension créatrice de l’écriture, nous invitant à une lecture poétique et esthétique. L’objectif de ce volume est ainsi d’attirer l’attention sur le pouvoir critique des images benjaminiennes, afin d’analyser leur efficacité discursive, leur caractère irréductible au concept et leur valeur à la fois philosophique et littéraire.
For students of modern criticism and theory, Walter Benjamin's writings have become essential reading. His analyses of photography, film, language, history, allegory, material culture, the poet ...Charles Baudelaire, and his vast examination of the social, political and historical significance of the Arcades of nineteenth-century Paris have left an enduring and important critical legacy. This volume examines in detail a substantial selection of his important critical writings on these topics from 1916 to 1940 and outlines his life in pre-war Germany, his association with the Frankfurt School, and the dissemination of his ideas and methodologies into a variety of academic disciplines since his death. David Ferris traces the development of Benjamin's key critical concepts and provides students with an accessible overview of the life, work and thought of one of the twentieth-century's most important literary and cultural critics.
In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Walter Benjamin projected a "macroscosmic journey" of the individual sleeper to "the dreaming collective, which, ...through the arcades, communes with its own insides." Benjamin's effort to transpose the dream phenomenon to the history of a collective remained fragmentary, though it underlies the principle of retrograde temporality, which, it is argued, is central to his idea of history. The "passages" are not just the Paris arcades: They refer also to Benjamin's effort to negotiate the labyrinth of his work and thought. Gelley works through many of Benjamin's later works and examines important critical questions: the interplay of aesthetics and politics, the genre of The Arcades Project, citation, language, messianism, aura, and the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening. For Benjamin, memory is not only antiquarian; it functions as a solicitation, a call to a collectivity to come. Gelley reads this call in the motif of awakening, which conveys a qualified but crucial performative intention of Benjamin's undertaking.
Inhalt
Vorwort ...
Verwendete Siglen ...
Einleitung ...
1. Rekonstruktion einer Freundschaft ...
1.1 Leitfragen, methodisches Vorgehen und Quellenlage ...
1.2. Ein vergessener Schriftsteller: Wilhelm ...Speyer ...
1.2.1 Anfänge als Schriftsteller ...
1.2.2 Berlin: »bekannt, aber mondän« ...
1.2.3 Flucht und Exil ...
1.3 Wilhelm Speyers Freundschaft mit Walter Benjamin ...
2. Popularisierung und Populärkultur: Benjamin als Mitarbeiter
2.1 Popularisierung von unten ...
2.2 Popularisierung als »heuristisches Prinzip« ...
2.3 Volkskunst als Vorbild einer neuen Gebrauchskunst ...
2.3.1 Überraschen, Erschrecken, Schenken ...
2.3.2 Humor, Gerechtigkeit, Schulung ...
2.3.2.1 Johann Peter Hebel ...
2.3.2.2 Schulung statt Schule: Rundfunkgeschichten für Kinder ...
2.4 Rat, Heilung, Hoffnung: neues Erzählen ...
2.4.1 Einverleiben und Einhüllen ...
2.4.2 Exkurs zum Stoff: Dienstmädchenromane
und Das Illustrierte Blatt ...
2.4.3 Träumen und Erwachen ...
2.4.4 Film-Rezeption: Sprengen ...
2.4.5 Montage und Experiment ...
2.4.6 Zusammenfassung: Benjamin als Mitarbeiter ...
3. Das Rundfunkgespräch Rezepte für Komödienschreiber (1930)
3.1 Benjamin als Kritiker ...
3.2 »Kollaboration mit Speyer« ...
3.3 Komödie der Gesellschaft ...
3.4 Zusammenfassung ...
4. Der Roman Ich geh aus und du bleibst da (1930) ...
4.1 Das Bild der Neuen Frau ...
4.2 Der Roman eines Mannequins ...
4.3 Rezeption ...
4.4 Versuchspersonen statt Persönlichkeiten ...
4.4.1 Großstadt und Land, Gegenwart und Vergangenheit ...
4.4.2 Neue Frau und Neuer Mann ...
4.5 Tiere, Kinder, Gottheitsdinge − Kleidungsstücke im Roman ...
4.5.1 Der Pelz als Fetisch ...
4.5.2 Mode und Mythos ...
4.5.3 Mannequins und Kleiderpuppen ...
4.6 Filme im Roman ...
4.7 Ratgeberroman für Angestellte ...
5. Die Komödien ...
5.1 Es geht. Aber es ist auch danach! (1929) ...
5.1.1 Neue Frau und Neue Sachlichkeit ...
5.1.2 Wahlverwandtschaften ...
5.1.3 Eine »magische Topographie von Berlin« ...
5.2 Jeder einmal in Berlin! (1930) ...
5.2.1 Zeitbezüge: Berliner Stadtmarketing, Dauertanz und Reklame
5.2.2 Reinhold Häckelmanns kuriose und sehr gefährliche Reise ...
5.2.3 Verwechslung und Verkleidung ...
5.3 Ein Mantel, ein Hut, ein Handschuh (1933) ...
5.3.1 Rezeption ...
5.3.2 Mord als Fokus ...
5.3.3 Der Stolz der einfachen Leute ...
5.3.4 Verbrecher und Detektiv ...
5.3.5 Wie die Requisiten dem Menschen mitspielen ...
5.3.5.1 Destruktion der Person ...
5.3.5.2 Verdinglichung ...
5.3.5.3 Dinge als Masken ...
Fazit ...
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Walter Benjamin Eiland, Howard; Jennings, Michael W
2014, 2014-01-16
eBook
Walter Benjamin was perhaps the twentieth century's most elusive intellectual. His writings defy categorization, and his improvised existence has proven irresistible to mythologizers. In a major new ...biography, Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings present a comprehensive portrait of the man and his times, as well as extensive commentary on his work.
