Walter Benjamin

by Ferris, David S.

• ISBN13: 9780804725705
• ISBN10: 0804725705
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-10-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

This collection of nine essays focuses on those writings of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) on literature and language that have a direct relevance to contemporary literary theory, notably his analyses of myth, violence, history, criticism, literature, and mass media. In an introductory essay, David S. Ferris discusses the problem of history, aura, and resistance in Benjamin's later work and in its reception. Samuel Weber, in a reading of Benjamin's most influential essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," analyzes the status of the image and technology in Benjamin's own terms and in the shadow of Heidegger. Rodolphe Gasche devotes himself to an analysis of Benjamin's dissertation on the German Romantics, providing a valuable guide to a major text that has yet to appear in English translation.

Author Biography

David S. Ferris is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen’s College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Theory and the Evasion of History.

Table of Contents

Contributors
Introduction: Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History	p. 1
Mass Mediauras; or, Art, Aura, and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin	p. 27
The Sober Absolute: On Benjamin and the Early Romantics	p. 50
The Genesis of Judgment: Spatiality, Analogy, and Metaphor in Benjamin's "On Language as Such and on Human Language"	p. 75
Walter Benjamin: Topographically Speaking	p. 94
The Poetic Ground Laid Bare (Benjamin Reading Baudelaire)	p. 118
On Presentation in Benjamin	p. 139
The Violence of Destruction	p. 165
Momentary Violence	p. 185
Notes	p. 209
Index of Names	p. 245
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