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4.24 AVERAGE
4.24 AVERAGE
For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
There are hardly enough superlatives for this amazing collection of essays concerning Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, messianism and the aesthetic tension between the cultic and the exhibitional. I had read Unpacking My Library a half dozen times previously and it still forces me to catch my breath. The thoughts on Kafka explore the mystical as well as the shock of the modern. The shock of the urban and industrial is a recurring theme in these pieces. Likewise is the dearth of actual experience and the onslaught of involuntary memory. It was a strange juxtaposition that this very morning I put down Illuminations and was enjoying my breakfast. Before me in the recent Bookforum was an article by Geoff Dyer about August Sander's People of the Twentieth Century https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/473219.August_Sander_1876_1964. Benjamin's idea of aura has likely morphed into something strange over the intervening 70 odd years.
There are hardly enough superlatives for this amazing collection of essays concerning Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, messianism and the aesthetic tension between the cultic and the exhibitional. I had read Unpacking My Library a half dozen times previously and it still forces me to catch my breath. The thoughts on Kafka explore the mystical as well as the shock of the modern. The shock of the urban and industrial is a recurring theme in these pieces. Likewise is the dearth of actual experience and the onslaught of involuntary memory. It was a strange juxtaposition that this very morning I put down Illuminations and was enjoying my breakfast. Before me in the recent Bookforum was an article by Geoff Dyer about August Sander's People of the Twentieth Century https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/473219.August_Sander_1876_1964. Benjamin's idea of aura has likely morphed into something strange over the intervening 70 odd years.
This was very helpful for my French Cultural Studies comprehensive exam.
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
reflective
slow-paced
A complex thinker with fragmented, peripatetic, and often poetic literary criticism. Not an easy read, but sprinkled with surprising insight, as all of his writings are.
Powerful writing although over my head as I have not read much of the subjects he critiques. Pedantic in the extreme, my sense is the translater did an awesome job of making it all accesible to the English speaking world.
Some good essays like the ones on Kafka and Art in the age of mechanical reproduction still stand today. Some of the essays are a bit more obscure. I have never heard of the writer Leskow for instance. Benjamin is still important for the essays on reproduction and art and the Kafka essay above. I know he is supposed to be a Marxist but the connection strikes me as a bit tenuous as it does for other colleagues at the Frankfurt school despite how much the right loves to equate them with it in their fevered imaginings. No doubt the Frankfurt school was mostly Marxist thinkers but the Marxism strikes me as a bit more incidental rather than essential.
last three pieces are very clearly the best of the bunch