Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital AgeHans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Michael Marrinan Since its publication in 1936, Walter Benjamin’s "Artwork” essay has become a canonical text about the status and place of the fine arts in modern mass culture. Benjamin was especially concerned with the ability of new technologies--notably film, sound recording, and photography--to reproduce works of art in great number. Benjamin could not have foreseen the explosion of imagery and media that has occurred during the past fifty years. Does Benjamin’s famous essay still speak to this new situation? That is the question posed by the editors of this book to a wide range of leading scholars and thinkers across a spectrum of disciplines in the humanities. The essays gathered here do not hazard a univocal reply to that question; rather they offer a rich, wide-ranging critique of Benjamin’s position that refracts and reflects contemporary thinking about the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications of life in the digital age. |
Contents
AURA DIRK BAECKER | 9 |
HISTORY NORBERT BOLZ | 24 |
TECHNOLOGY KARLHEINZ BARCK | 39 |
Copyright | |
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Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht No preview available - 2003 |
Common terms and phrases
actor aesthetic apparatus Arcades Project artistic Artwork essay audience auratic aureole authenticity Baudelaire become Benja Benjamin's Artwork essay Benjamin's essay Benjamin's text Bertolt Brecht Brecht camera century Charles Baudelaire cinema claim communication concept of aura contemporary context copy critical critique cult value cultic cultural Dadaist discourse distance distinction distraction example experience fact Fascism film filmic Friedrich Kittler function gaze Goethe hand Heartfield's human Ibid individual intellectual Kunstwerk l'art l'art pour l'art logic mass media masses means mechanical reproduction media theory medieval medium mode modern montage movie nature object observation original painting perception performance photography photomontage political possible present production question reality representation repro revolutionary ritual Schindler's List seems sense social society sound film status Storyteller suggests symbolic technical reproduction techniques theory thing thinking tion tradition transformation unique Walter Benjamin words writing