Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin was one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century. Illuminations includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and Benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin's life in dark times. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times.

Illuminations

Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art“ essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general. This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the “Work of Art“ essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media.

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

J. A. Underwood

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Focusing on the arcades of 19th-century Paris--glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources. 46 illustrations.

The Arcades Project

Deals with surrealism, Brecht, Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Marseilles, Naples, violence, fate, language, and character

Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing

Reflections

This is the first major collection of short stories from the legendary German-Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Benjamin is best known for his groundbreaking studies on literature, including works on Goethe and Kafka, and for his books Illuminations, One Way Street and The Arcades Project. Translated and collected for the first time, The Storyteller includes some of his most accessible and engaging writing, with forms ranging from novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables, and riddles. Benjamin's prose serves to illuminate his far-reaching philosophical project and explores themes of mythology, childhood imagination, and social justice.

Tales Out of Loneliness

The Storyteller

Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Benjamin's recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin's West End at the turn of the century is translated into English for the first time in book form.

Berlin Childhood Around 1900

Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to '33, he wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers the surviving transcripts, which appear here for the first time in English. This eclectic collection demonstrates the range of Benjamin's thinking and his enthusiasm for popular sensibilities. His celebrated “Enlightenment for Children” youth programs, his plays, readings, book reviews, and fiction reveal Benjamin in a creative, rather than critical, mode. They flesh out ideas elucidated in his essays, some of which are also represented here, where they cover topics as varied as getting a raise and the history of natural disasters, subjects chosen for broad appeal and examined with passion and acuity. Delightful and incisive, this is Walter Benjamin channeling his sophisticated thinking to a wide audience, allowing us to benefit from a new voice for one of the twentieth century's most respected thinkers.

Radio Benjamin

One of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, Walter Benjamin's groundbreaking essay explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeatedly – and what the troubling social and political implications of this are. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

A new translation of philosopher Walter Benjamin's work as it pertains to his famous essay, "The Storyteller," this collection includes short stories, book reviews, parables, and as a selection of writings by other authors who had an influence on Benjamin's work. “The Storyteller” is one of Walter Benjamin’s most important essays, a beautiful and suggestive meditation on the relation between narrative form, social life, and individual existence—and the product of at least a decade’s work. What might be called the story of The Storyteller Essays starts in 1926, with a piece Benjamin wrote about the German romantic Johann Peter Hebel. It continues in a series of short essays, book reviews, short stories, parables, and even radio shows for children. This collection brings them all together to give readers a new appreciation of how Benjamin’s thinking changed and ripened over time, while including several key readings of his own—texts by his contemporaries Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács; by Paul Valéry; and by Herodotus and Montaigne. Finally, to bring things around, there are three short stories by “the incomparable Hebel” with whom the whole intellectual adventure began.

The Storyteller Essays

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

L'opera d'arte nell'epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica

Walter Benjamin - philosopher, essayist, literary and cultural theorist - was one of the most original writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. This new selection brings together Benjamin's major works, including "One-Way Street", his dreamlike, aphoristic observations of urban life in Weimar Germany; "Unpacking My Library", a delightful meditation on book-collecting; the confessional "Hashish in Marseille"; and, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", his seminal essay on how technology changes the way we appreciate art. Also including writings on subjects ranging from Proust to Kafka, violence to surrealism, this is the essential volume on one of the most prescient critical voices of the modern age. It contains: "Unpacking My Library"; "One-Way Street"; "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"; "Brief History of Photography"; "Hashish in Marseille"; "On the Critique of Violence"; "The Job of the Translator"; "Surrealism"; "Franz Kafka"; and, "Picturing Proust."

One-way Street, and Other Writings

On The Concept of History written by legendary author Walter Benjamin is widely considered to be one of the top 100 greatest books of all time. This great classic will surely attract a whole new generation of readers. For many, On The Concept of History is required reading for various courses and curriculums. And for others who simply enjoy reading timeless pieces of classic literature, this gem by Walter Benjamin is highly recommended. Published by Classic House Books and beautifully produced, On The Concept of History would make an ideal gift and it should be a part of everyone's personal library.

On the Concept of History

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts. In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers. Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.

Selected Writings

"In this book Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank. More than a series of studies of Baudelaire, these essays show the extent to which Benjamin identifies with the poet and enable him to explore his own notion of heroism."--BOOK JACKET.

Essays on Charles Baudelaire

The Writer of Modern Life

Dès son titre, l'ouvrage annonce le tournant opéré par la modernité. Benjamin montre dans cet essai lumineux et dense que l’avènement de la photographie, puis du cinéma, n’est pas l’apparition d’une simple technique nouvelle, mais qu’il bouleverse de fond en comble le statut de l’oeuvre d’art, en lui ôtant ce que Benjamin nomme son “aura”. C'est désormais la reproduction qui s'expose, mettant en valeur la possibilité pour l'oeuvre d'art de se retrouver n'importe où. Capacité à circuler qui la transforme en marchandise. Benjamin met au jour les conséquences immenses de cette révolution, bien au-delà de la sphère artistique, dans tout le champ social et politique. Avec le cinéma, c'est la technique de reproduction elle-même qui désormais produit l'œuvre d'art. Là, c'est l'image de l'acteur qui devient marchandise, consommée par le public qui constitue son marché. La massification du public de ces œuvres a servi les totalitarismes. D'où "l'esthétisation de la politique" encouragée par le fascisme et la "politisation de l'art" défendue par le communisme.

Walter Benjamin

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