Walter Benjamin

Samuel Weber

Avalon Professor of Comparative Literature Samuel Weber

In this book, Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin's thought by focusing the critical suffix "-ability" that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin's thought by way of his language - and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin's work ever written.

Benjamin's -abilities

Henry Sussman

Textual Studies

Glyph Six

This radically new reading of La peau de charin presents a case for Balzac as a modern rather than a traditional, realist writer. Using the principles and languages of Marx, Derrida, Freud, Barthea, and others who have contributed to a redefinition of modern criticism, Samuel Weber presents a detailed and intricate explication of the text that challenges all standard interpretations of the novel. Traditional readings of La peau de chagrin, and of Balzac in general, have pursued a message in the novel, a reality beneath the allegory. Weber demonstrates that Balzac's text can be grasped both as a mise en scène and as a play of representations that reflects no original truth, reality, or meaning beneath the text to which the representation can be referred and by which they can be authenticated. To unwrap Balzac in this manner is to discover that there is no thing inside, that there is only the 'wrapping.' Weber's conclusions are not only startingly original, but they also solve problems which have puzzled traditional readers of the novel since the earliest commentators of 1831. Unwrapping Balzac is a brilliant tour de force that will create controversy among Balzac scholars for years to come.

A Reading of La Peau de Chagrin

Unwrapping Balzac

Werner Holly

Peter Krapp

Ludwig Jäger

Simone Heekeren

This handbook undertakes a systematic historical reflection on "cultural science gaps" in linguistics, and seeks to contribute to their resolution. How can linguistics be a cultural science? Answering this question requires the use of methodological resources in linguistics as well as outside perspectives drawn from related disciplines.

Ein Internationales Handbuch Zu Linguistik Als Kulturwissenschaft / an International Handbook of Linguistics As Cultural Study

Sprache - Kultur - Kommunikation / Language - Culture - Communication

Avalon Professor of Comparative Literature Samuel Weber

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