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Overview
“An ensemble of American and European scholars has produced a collective endeavor of the highest scholarly, conceptual, and essayistic quality throughout. There is an enormous storehouse of creativity in this volume that establishes definitively that contemporary academic study has risen to the considerable challenge furnished by the diverse writings of Walter Benjamin.”—Henry Sussman, SUNY, BuffaloSynopsis
The book explores the implications for today's critical concerns of the
work of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Although his writings are
considered to be among the most powerful and suggestive theoretical
enterprises of the twentieth century, his ideas are strangely resistant
to cooptation by the established doctrines of various critical programs.
The innovative essays gathered here engage this resistance by examining
the notion of the ghostly in Benjamin's work.
The contributors show that the urgent and haunting truths Benjamin
offers point toward new forms of responsibility, even as they withdraw
from straightforward meaning and transparent forms of expression. These
truths reside in a figurative elsewhere, a ghostly space that his texts
delimit but never fully inhabit, and these essays seek to do justice to
the ghosts of Benjamin that are already on board with us.
Through close textual readings and thoughtful contextualizations,
internationally known Benjamin scholars engage a wide range of issues,
including: the status of the image in Benjamin's literary reflections
and in his meditations on cinema and visual culture; abiding Benjaminian
notions of messianism, aura, reproducibility, semblance, and melancholy;
Benjamin's relation to Freud; his innovative rethinking of history,
virtuality, and translation; and his reflections on tragedy and
prophecy, the geometrical dimensions of writing, and the relation
between eros and language.
The contributors are Norbert Bolz, Fritz Breithaupt, Stanley
Corngold, Peter Fenves, Eva Geulen, Miriam Hansen, Beatrice Hanssen,
Lutz Koepnick, Tom McCall, Kevin McLaughlin, Bettine Menke, Rainer
Nägele, Gerhard Richter, Laurence Rickels, and Sigrid Weigel.
About the Author:
Gerhard Richter is Associate Professor of German and
Affiliate Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison.
Booknews
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) has been characterized as a new historicist and a founder of the study of popular culture. In 14 essays, some previously published, German and US scholars of German literature and culture share the assumption that rather than assimilating his texts mimetically into this or that ideology, critics should seek the most valuable and provocative ideas in his texts, which seem to remain obscure and problematic. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)