In The Language Of Walter Benjamin

Known for his essays on culture, aesthetics, and literature, Walter Benjamin also wrote on the philosophy of language. For Alexander Stern, his famously obscure—and, for some, hopelessly mystical—early work contains important insights, anticipating and in some respects surpassing Wittgenstein’s later thinking on the philosophy of language.

If Walter Benjamin (with an irony that belies his seemingly tragic life) is now recognized as one of the century's most important writers, reading him is no easy matter. Benjamin opens one of his most notable essays, "The Task of the Translator," with the words "No poem is intended for the reader, no image for the beholder, no symphony for the listener." How does one read an author who tells us that writing does not communicate very much to the reader? How does one learn to regard what comes to us from Benjamin as something other than direct expression? Carol Jacobs' In the Language of Walter Benjamin is an attempt to come to terms with this predicament. It does so by teasing out such guidelines for criticism as Benjamin seems to offer in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Jacobs reminds us of Benjamin's distinction between truth and knowledge. She above all insists on his method of philosophical contemplation as performance, on a performance that demands precise immersion in the minute details of subject matter. In what follows, Jacobs practices this immersion in the details of Benjamin's performance as she reads some of his key works: the autobiographical Berlin Chronicle, the apparently biographical study of Proust, the fictional autobiographical story of "Myslowitz -- Braunschweig -- Marseille," and those essays on the theory of language so crucial to an understanding of Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," "Doctrine of the Similar," and "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man." "The essays that follow were written over the span of an academic lifetime. They are the intermittent attempts from the late sixties through the early nineties in which I have tried to understand Benjamin, or rather, to understand his work, to come to terms with it, though never as a totality. I would like to believe he taught me how to read in the practice of interrupting intention. The process of contemplation that these essays perform, then, is marked by an unceasing pausing for breath (sometimes for many years)." -- Carol Jacobs, from In the Language of Walter Benjamin

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.

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

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.

This book is the first to consider the presence of history and the question of historical practice in Walter Benjamin's work. Benjamin, the critic and philosopher of history, was also the practitioner, the authors contend, and it is in the practice of historical writing that the materialist aspect of his thought is most evident. Some of the essays analyze Benjamin's writings in cultural history and the philosophy of history. Others connect his historical and theoretical practices to issues in contemporary feminism and post-colonial studies, and to cultural contexts including the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. In different ways, the authors all find in Benjamin's specific notion of historical materialism a dialectic between textual and cultural analysis which can reinvigorate the relation between literary and historical studies.

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.

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

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 Gasché 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.