Working With Walter Benjamin

Download or read book Working with Walter Benjamin written by Andrew Benjamin and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Walter Benjamin and Art written by Andrew Benjamin and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-02-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Benjamin's most famous and influential essay remains The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Walter Benjamin and the Work of Art is the first book to provide a broad and dedicated analysis of this canonical work and its effect upon core contemporary concerns in the visual arts, aesthetics and the history of philosophy. The book is structured around three distinct areas: the extension of Benjamin's work; the question of historical connection; the importance of the essay in the development of criticism of both the visual arts and literature. Contributors to the volume include major Benjamin commentators, whose work has very much defined the reception of the essay, and leading philosophers, historians and aesthetician, whose approaches open up new areas of interest and relevance.

Download or read book A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin written by Rolf J. Goebel and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2009 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) has emerged as one of the leading cultural critics of the twentieth century. His work encompasses aesthetics, metaphysical language and narrative theories, German literary history, philosophies of history, the intersection of Marxism and Messianic thought, urban topography, and the development of photography and film. Benjamin defined the task of the critic as one that blasts endangered moments of the past out of the continuum of history so that they attain new significance. This volume of new essays employs this principle of actualization as its methodological program in offering a new advanced introduction to Benjamin's own work. The essays analyze Benjamin's central texts, themes, terminologies, and genres in their original contexts while simultaneously situating them in new parameters, such as contemporary media, memory culture, constructions of gender, postcoloniality, and theories of urban topographies. The Companion brings together an international group of established and emerging scholars to explicate Benjamin's actuality from a multidisciplinary perspective. Designed for audiences interested in literary criticism, cultural studies, and neighboring disciplines, the volume serves as a stimulus for new debates about Benjamin's intellectual legacy today. Contributors: Wolfgang Bock, Willi Bolle, Dianne Chisholm, Adrian Daub, Dominik Finkelde, Eric Jarosinski, Lutz Koepnick, Vivian Liska, Karl Ivan Solibakke, Marc de Wilde, Bernd Witte Rolf J. Goebel is Distinguished Professor of German and Chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Download or read book Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition written by John McCole and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Walter Benjamin written by Uwe Steiner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-08-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven decades after his death, German Jewish writer, philosopher, and literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) continues to fascinate and influence. Here Uwe Steiner offers a comprehensive and sophisticated introduction to the oeuvre of this intriguing theorist. Acknowledged only by a small circle of intellectuals during his lifetime, Benjamin is now a major figure whose work is essential to an understanding of modernity. Steiner traces the development of Benjamin’s thought chronologically through his writings on philosophy, literature, history, politics, the media, art, photography, cinema, technology, and theology. Walter Benjamin reveals the essential coherence of its subject’s thinking while also analyzing the controversial or puzzling facets of Benjamin’s work. That coherence, Steiner contends, can best be appreciated by placing Benjamin in his proper context as a member of the German philosophical tradition and a participant in contemporary intellectual debates. As Benjamin’s writing attracts more and more readers in the English-speaking world, Walter Benjamin will be a valuable guide to this fascinating body of work.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin written by David S. Ferris and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-25 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion offers a comprehensive introduction to the thought of the highly influential twentieth-century critic and theorist Walter Benjamin. The volume provides examinations of the different aspects of Benjamin's work that have had a significant effect on contemporary critical and historical thought. Topics discussed by experts in the field include Benjamin's relation to the avant-garde movements of his time, his theories on language and mimesis, modernity, his significance and relevance to modern cultural studies, and his autobiographical writings. Additional material includes a guide to further reading and a chronology.

Download or read book Illuminations written by Walter Benjamin and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-11-05 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illuminations contains the most celebrated work of Walter Benjamin, one of the most original and influential thinkers of the 20th Century: 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', ‘The Task of the Translator’ and 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', as well as essays on Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht's epic theatre, Proust and an anatomy of his own obsession, book collecting. This now legendary volume offers the best possible access to Benjamin’s singular and significant achievement, while Hannah Arendt’s introduction reveals how his life and work are a prism to his times.