The Cambridge Introduction to Walter Benjamin

by David S. Ferris

• ISBN13: 9780521864589
• ISBN10: 0521864585
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
List of abbreviations	p. xii
Life	p. 1
1892-1912 Berlin: childhood and school years	p. 2
1912-1917 University, war, and marriage	p. 4
1917-1925 Pursuit of an academic career	p. 8
1925-1933 Critical ambitions	p. 12
1933-1940 Exile in Paris	p. 16
1940 Flight from Europe	p. 19
Contexts	p. 22
The student youth movement and the First World War	p. 22
The George School	p. 23
The Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism	p. 24
Marxism and the Frankfurt School	p. 26
Works	p. 29
(a) Metaphysical beginnings 1914-1918	p. 29
"The Life of Students"	p. 29
"Two Poems by Friedrich Holderlin"	p. 33
"On Language in General and on the Language of Man"	p. 36
"On the Program of the Coming Philosophy"	p. 42
(b) Raising criticism 1919-1925	p. 45
The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism	p. 47
"Critique of Violence"	p. 52
"Goethe's Elective Affinities"	p. 57
"The Task of the Translator"	p. 62
Origin of the German Tragic Drama	p. 66
(c) Culture, politics, and criticism 1926-1931	p. 74
One-Way Street	p. 75
"Surrealism. The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia"	p. 78
"On the Image of Proust"	p. 82
"Theories of German Fascism"	p. 84
"Karl Kraus"	p. 88
(d) Media and revolution 1931-1936	p. 91
"Little History of Photography"	p. 92
"The Author as Producer"	p. 96
"Franz Kafka. On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death"	p. 102
"The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility"	p. 104
"The Storyteller"	p. 111
(e) History, materialism, and the messianic 1936-1940	p. 114
The Arcades Project	p. 115
Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism	p. 122
"On the Concept of History"	p. 130
Critical reception	p. 136
Translation and early history of reception	p. 136
Political and Marxist-influenced reception	p. 140
Reception in literary and critical theory	p. 141
Benjamin across disciplines and in recent critical approaches	p. 143
Notes	p. 146
Guide to further reading	p. 148
Index	p. 155
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