Synopses & Reviews
An absorbing selection of Walter Benjamin's personal manuscripts, images, and documents from his own collection.The works of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin are a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps and fragments of everyday life, arts and dreams. This beautifully designed book gives an insight into Benjamin's habits of collecting and archiving through some of his most personal documents. From notebooks in which every conceivable space is covered with handwriting, and a heartfelt traveller's series of postcards, to a sequence of Benjamin's own photographs, and lists that include a collection of his son Stefan's early words and sentences, this wonderful collection testifies to Benjamin's complex and kaleidoscopic passion for the ephemera of human life. Illustrated throughout in color and b/w.
Synopsis
The works of the great literary and cultural critic Benjamin are a reservoir of texts, commentaries, and fragments of everyday life. This beautifully designed book gives an insight into Benjamins habits of collecting and archiving through some of his most personal documents.
Synopsis
An absorbing selection of Walter Benjamin's personal manuscripts, images, and documents.
About the Author
Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of
Illuminations,
The Arcades Project, and
The Origin of German Tragic Drama.Esther Leslie is a lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism and sits on the editorial boards of Historical Materialism, Radical Philosophy and Revolutionary History.