Walter Benjamin

Gary Smith

Howard Eiland

Even as a young man Benjamin possessed astonishing intellectual range and depth. His topics here include poetry and fiction, drama, philosophy, history, religion, love, violence, morality, mythology, painting and much more.

Selected Writings: 1913-1926

a critical life

Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics Gary Smith

Comprising more than 65 pieces - journal articles, reviews, extended essays, sketches, aphorisms, and fragments - this volume shows the range of Walter Benjamin's writing. His topics here include poetry, fiction, drama, history, religion, love, violence, morality and mythology.

Selected Writings: 1935-1938

Walter Benjamin was perhaps the twentieth century's most elusive intellectual. His writings defy categorization, and his improvised existence has proven irresistible to mythologizers. In a major new biography, Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings present a comprehensive portrait of the man and his times, as well as extensive commentary on his work.

Focusing on the 17th-century play of mourning, Walter Benjamin identifies allegory as the constitutive trope of modernity, bespeaking a haunted, bedeviled world of mutability and eternal transience. In this rigorous elegant translation, history as trauerspiel is the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal.

Howard Eiland

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