The Cambridge Companion to Walter BenjaminDavid S. Ferris This Companion offers a comprehensive introduction to the work and 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, the form of the work of art, his theories on language and mimesis, modernity, his relation to Brecht and the Frankfurt School, his significance and relevance to modern cultural studies, his formative interpretation of Romanticism, and his autobiographical writings. The volume is aimed at readers who may be coming to Benjamin for the first time or who have some knowledge of Benjamin but would like to know more about the issues and concepts central to his work. Additional material includes a guide to further reading and a chronology. |
Contents
Walter Benjamin and the European avantgarde | |
Art forms | |
Language and mimesis in Walter Benjamins work | |
Walter Benjamins concept of cultural history | |
Benjamins modernity | |
Benjamin and psychoanalysis | |
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Absolute Adorno aesthetic allegory appears Arcades Project art history artistic artwork attempt autobiographical avantgarde baroque Baudelaire Benjamin writes Berlin Childhood bourgeois Brecht Burckhardt caesura Cambridge Companion collective commodity commodity fetishism Concept of Criticism constellation construction critique cultural history dialectical image dream edited Elective Affinities emerges epic theater essay experience Exposé of 1935 expression figure fragments Frankfurt Frankfurt School Freud Friedrich Schlegel Fuchs German Tragic Drama Gershom Scholem Goethe Goethe’s graphology Hegel historical materialism historicism human ideology individual interpretation interruption language literary Marx Marxist materialist means Messianic mimesis mimetic modernity montage nature nineteenth century notion Novalis object OneWay Street Origin Paris past phantasmagoria philosophy political possibility precisely present production prose psychoanalysis question radical reading reflection relation relationship representation Riegl Romantic Romanticism Schlegel Scholem social Surrealism Surrealists symbol task technological temporality theory trans translation truth understanding University Press Walter Benjamin Warburg Wölfflin word work’s