Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930 (Walter Benjamin)

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.

Fifty years after his death, Walter Benjamin remains one of the great cultural critics of this century. Despite his renown, however, Benjamin's philosophical ideas remain elusive--often considered a disaggregated set of thoughts not meant to cohere. This book provides a more systematic perspective on Benjamin, laying claim to his status as a philosopher and situating his work in the context of its time. Exploring Benjamin's theory of language, spoken and nonspoken, Rainer Rochlitz shows how Benjamin reconceptualized traditional ideas of language, art, and history. Offering an expansive assessment of a unique twentieth-century thinker, this volume provides an indispensable guide for readers of Benjamin's recently released collected works.

The book is structured around three distinct areas: the extension of Benjamin's work; the question of historical connection; the importance of the essay in the development of criticism of both the visual arts and literature. Contributors to the volume include major Benjamin commentators, whose work has very much defined the reception of the essay, and leading philosophers, historians and aesthetician, whose approaches open up new areas of interest and relevance.

The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art

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The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art
Walter O. Evans
Manufacturer: Tide-Mark Press
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ASIN: 0295979224

Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on his Radio Years

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Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on his Radio Years
Jeffrey Mehlman
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0226518655

In light of the legendary difficulty of Walter Benjamin's
works, it is a strange and intriguing fact that from 1929 to
1933 the great critic and cultural theorist wrote—and
broadcast—numerous scripts, on the order of fireside
chats, for children. Invited to speak on whatever subject he
considered appropriate, Benjamin talked to the children of
Frankfurt and Berlin about the destruction of Pompeii, an
earthquake in Lisbon, and a railroad disaster at the Firth of
Tay. He spoke about bootlegging and swindling, cataclysm and
suicide, Faust and Cagliostro. In this first sustained
analysis of the thirty surviving scripts, Jeffrey Mehlman
demonstrates how Benjamin used the unlikely forum of
children's radio to pursue some of his central philosophical
and theological concerns.

In Walter Benjamin for Children, readers will
encounter a host of intertextual surprises: an evocation of
the flooding of the Mississippi informed by the argument of
"The Task of the Translator;" a discussion of scams
in stamp-collecting that turns into "The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction;" a tale of
bootlegging in the American South that converges with the
best of Benjamin's essays on fiction. Mehlman superimposes a
dual series of texts dealing with catastrophe, on the one
hand, and fraud, on the other, that resonate with the false-
messianic theology of Sabbatianism as it came to focus the
attention and enthusiasm of Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem
during the same years. The radio scripts for children, that
is, offer an unexpected byway, on the eve of the apocalypse,
into Benjamin's messianic preoccupations.

A child's garden of deconstruction, these twenty-minute
talks—from the perspective of childhood, before an
invisible audience, on whatever happened to cross the
critic's mind—are also by their very nature the closest
we may ever come to a transcript of a psychoanalysis of
Walter Benjamin. Particularly alive to that circumstance,
Mehlman explores the themes of the radio broadcasts and
brilliantly illuminates their hidden connections to
Benjamin's life and work.

This lucid analysis brings to light some of the least
researched and understood aspects of Walter Benjamin's
thought. It will interest and provoke literary theorists and
philosophers of culture, as well as anyone who hopes to
understand one of this century's most suggestive and
perplexing critics.

Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics is an innovative attempt to reconceive the key concepts of religious studies through a reading with, and against, Walter Benjamin. Brent Plate deftly sifts through Benjamin's voluminous writings showing how his concepts of art, allegory, and experience undo traditional religious concepts such as myth, symbol, memory, narrative, creation, and redemption. Recasting religion as religious practice, as process and movement, Plate locates a Benjaminian materialist aesthetics, what the author calls an "allegorical aesthetics," in order to uncover sources and establish a new locus for the study of religion.

Placing the concept of an allegorical aesthetics into practice, Plate offers examinations of aesthetic productions such as Daniel Libeskind's architecture and Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades alongside religious developments such as the Hindu Bhakti movement and Jewish Kabbalistic thought.

Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics will be necessary reading for those interested in religion and the arts, aesthetics, and material culture.

Romance of the Mango: The Complete Book of the King of Fruits

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Romance of the Mango: The Complete Book of the King of Fruits
Kusum Budhwar
Manufacturer: Penguin Books
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Binding: Paperback

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The Great Mango Book

ASIN: 0143028642

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Calvin y Hobbes 12
Bill Watterson
Manufacturer: MPI Home Video
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 8440685432