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Book Information & Reviews on-line:
Works by Walter
Benjamin available in English translation:
***Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940
Edited by Howard Eiland, Michael W. Jennings [Harvard University Press]
***Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,Volume 3, 1935-1938,
Edited by Howard Eiland, Michael W. Jennings [Harvard University Press]
The Arcades Project, edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Illustrated. 1,073 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. [New York Times Book Review: James Miller, "The Start of Something Big," (February 20, 2000)]
Selected Writings Volume 1: 1913-1926, edited by Marcus Bollock and Michael W. Jennings, the first of three such volumes, is presented on Harvard University Press' Fall '96 book list. Belknap Press. Among the many essays and fragments appearing for the first time in English are Benjamin's dissertation, "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism" and "Goethe's Elective Affinities."
Selected Writings Volume 2: 1927 - 1934 [MICHAEL W. JENNINGS, EDITOR:
[From the Publisher's Review: "This volume brings together previously untranslated writings on major figures such as Brecht, Valery, and Gide, and on subjects ranging from film, radio, and the novel to memory, kitsch, and the theory of language.
Understanding Brecht (trans. Anna Bostock, intro. Stanley Mitchell, London, Verso), "In Understanding Brecht we find collected together Benjamin's most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor. Stimulated by Brecht's oeuvre and theorising his particular dramatic techniques, Benjamin developed his own ideas about the role of art and the artist in a crisis-ridden society." [Verso Press review] Walter Benjamin & Theodor W. Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928 - 1940, Edited by Henri Lonitz. Translated by Nicholas Walker. 383 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. The Origins of German Tragic Drama (trans. John Osborne, intro. George Steiner, London, Verso), "The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Dürer and the theatre of Calderón and Shakespeare. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. [orderinf info. from Amazon]
Moscow Diary is also available from Harvard University Press. (1986).This posthumously published diary kept by Walter Benjamin when he visited Asja Lacis in Moscow from December 1926 to January 1927 is now considered not only one of the most revealing personal documents he ever wrote, but also an invaluable eyewitness account of life in Moscow during this period. Illuminations, ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, Schocken Books [ISBN: 0805202412 ;Paperback - 278 pages. The first book-length English translation of Walter Benjamin. It contains the essays "Unpacking my Library," "The Task of the Translator," "The Storyteller," "Franz Kafka," "Some Reflections on Kafka," "What is Epic Theatre?" "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," "The Image of Proust," "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," "Theses on the Philosophy of History," and an excellent introductory essay by Hannah Arendt. [Ordering Info. from Amazon.com] The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940 Edited and annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. Translated, edited, and annotated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. 652 p. (1994 ) Available through the Association of American University Presses Online Catalog.
Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, intro. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Schocken Books, ISBN: 080520802X; Paperback - 348 pages (March 1986) [Ordering Info. from Amazon.com]
Description:Walter Benjamin and Romanticism explores the relationship between Walter Benjamin's literary and philosophical work and the tradition of German Romanticism, as well as Hölderlin and Goethe. Through a detailed and scholarly analysis of the major texts, the book explores the endurance of Benjamin's relationship to Romanticism, the residual presence of Romantic Goethean and Hölderlinian motifs in Benjamin's subsequent writings and how Benjamin's understanding of the relationship between criticism and Romanticism can still play a vital role in contemporary philosophical and literary practice.
Praise for Walter Benjamin and Romanticism:"From beginning to end Walter Benjamin engages in an intimate debate with the origin and legacy of German romanticism. This is the first volume in any language that has given this dense and difficult topic its due and will prove to be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the complex shape of Benjamin's thought."
--Peter Fenves, Northwestern University
Table of Contents: Introduction: Beatrice Hanssen, University of Georgia, Athens and Andrew Benjamin, Monash University
Part I. Walter Benjamin and the Early Romantics :
Introduction to Walter Benjamin's The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, University of Strasbourg
Walter Benjamin's Exposition of the Romantic Theory of Reflection, Winfried Menninghaus, Free University, Berlin
The Sober Absolute: On Benjamin and the Early Romantics, Rodolphe Gasché, SUNY, Buffalo
Fortgang and Zusammenhang: Walter Benjamin and the Romantic Novel, Anthony Phelan, Keble College, Oxford
However One Calls Into the Forest: Echoes of Translation, Bettine Menke, University of Erfurt
Unfolding: Reading After Romanticism, Josh Cohen, Goldsmiths College, London
The Absolute as Translatability: Working Through Walter Benjamin on Language, Andrew Benjamin, Monash University
Benjamin, Romanticism, and the Foundations of Critical Theory, Fred Rush, University of Notre Dame
Part II. Beyond Early Romanticism: Benjamin, Hölderlin, Goethe
'Dichtermut' and 'Blödigkeit'-Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin, Interpreted by Walter Benjamin, Beatrice Hanssen, University of Georgia, Athens
Poetry's Courage, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, University of Strasbourg
Benjamin's Affinity: Goethe, the Romantics, and the Pure Problem of Criticism, David Ferris, University of Colorado, Boulder
The Artwork as Breach of a Beyond: On the Dialectic of Divine and Human Order in Walter Benjamin's 'Goethe's Elective Affinities', Sigrid Weigel, Technical University, Berlin
Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography: Gerhard Richter, August 6 x 9 / 304 pages / 5 illustrations ISBN 0-8143-2880-6 cloth: $34.95s/ Kritik: German Literary Theory and Culture Series. From Publisher's Review: "Although Walter Benjamin (18921940) is considered one of the most significant writers and theorists in twentieth-century Western culture, his enigmatic sense of the political has eluded definition. His later work in particular stages a perpetual but little understood confrontation with German fascism.
Gerhard Richter shows that Benjamin's engagement with the political cannot be understood in terms of unified concepts and fully deducible theses that can be easily verified or refuted. Rather than explaining his sense of the political, Benjamin enacts it in the movement of his language. Richter traces Benjamin's radical notions of the political through a series of corporeal figures in his often-neglected autobiographical writingsÐthe Moscow Diary, the Berlin Chronicle, and the Berlin Childhood around 1900. Each text subtly mobilizes a different trope of anatomy: the body, the ear, and the eye. Richter places these figures into a wide network of references from Benjamin's corpus, demonstrating that Benjamin's innovative acts of self-portraiture are inseparable from his analyses of the physiognomy of Weimar culture and German fascism. Benjamin's preoccupation with the body becomes visible as a political struggle that illuminates the relations among the self, history, reading, and language. Benjamin's autobiographies, as Richter shows, negate fascism and its ideology of stable meaning with each turn away from an essential corporeal self. "
"Gerhard Richter's Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography is not merely the most extensive and insightful treatment of Benjamin's autobiographical writings. It also offers a challenging reading of Benjamin's writings as a whole, a reading that serves as an important corrective to any facile appropriation of portions of Benjamin's corpus. Drawing on a deep knowledge of the breadth of Benjamin's production as well as on a critical mastery of contemporary cultural theory, Richter presents a resistant and refractory Benjaminian text. He has a remarkable ear for the instabilities, fissures, and cruxes of Benjamin's language. This is a remarkable achievement." -Michael Jennings, Princeton University
WALTER BENJAMIN: Overpowering Conformism by Esther Leslie/ Pluto Press/£ 14.99 / US$ 17.95 PAPER/ 2000/05 / 320pp / DEMY (215x135mm)ISBN: 0745315682/ Series: Modern European Thinkers.
Walter Benjamin's writings on culture, philosophy and politics are among the most important of the twentieth-century. Surveying the entirety of Benjamin's work, including his unpublished German texts, Esther Leslie's concise, well-organised study provides a valuable introduction to this independently-minded Marxist. Leslie focuses on Benjamin's commentary on the politics and aesthetics of technology - from his work on nineteenth-century industrial culture to his analyses of the Nazi deployment of the bomber - thus providing the first English-language assimilation of this key area of Benjamin's writing. With an overview of Benjamin's political affiliations and the political context in which he wrote, this important new study corrects the post-structuralist bias that has characterised so much Benjamin scholarship and restores Benjamin to the political arena.
Esther Leslie is a lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Author's note / Preliminaries: An Accumulation of Technological Themes / Chapter one: Explosion of a Landscape / Chapter two: Benjamin's Objectives / Chapter three: Berlin Chthonic, Photos and Trains and Films and Cars / Chapter four: Dream Whirled: Technik and Mirroring / Chapter five: Murmurs from Darkest Europe / Chapter six: The Work of Art in the Age of Unbearable Capitulation / Chapter seven: Time for an Unnatural Death / Benjamin's Finale; Excavating and Re-membering.
Walter Benjamin's Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels by Beatrice Hanssen (1997) University of California Press, Berkeley. [View an abstract of the book] From UC Berkeley's series Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism: Vol. 15. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project by Susan Buck-Morss (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought Series), MIT Press; ISBN: 0262521644 ; Paperback Reprint edition (October 1991) Walter Benjamin An Aesthetic of Redemption by Richard Wolin. (1982) University of California Press, Berkeley. From UC Berkeley's series Weimar and Now: German Cultural
Walter Benjamin's Passages: by Pierre Missac, translated by Shierry Weber Nicolsen, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1995. Short publisher's review from MIT Press. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of the Surrealist Revolution by Margaret Cohen (1995). University of California Press, Berkeley. The Actuality of Walter Benjamin , Laura Marcus & Lynda Nead (eds). [Paperback, 176pp, ISBN 0 85315 863 0 All rights L&W. Lawrence & Wishart, 99a Wallis Road, London E9 5LN U. K.]
Benjamin for Beginners by Lloyd Spencer. A Writers And Readers Beginners Documentary Comic Book//Softcover//
"Offers a clear and accessible guide to one of the most intriguing and inspiring thinkers of the century, Walter Benjamin." [Ordering information from Amazon.com]
Walter Benjamin for Beginners by Howard Caygill, Alex Coles & Andrzej Klimowski (1998). Published by Icon Books in the U.K. Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience by Howard Caygill, Routledge; ISBN: 041508959X, Paperback - 208 pages (February 1998)
Walter Benjamin: A Biography by Momme Brodersen (1995). Verso: London.
Walter Benjamin: Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reijen (New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1996). Sociological Research Online: ordering information.
Walter Benjamin and the Demand of History, ed. Michael P. Steinberg, Cornell Univ Pr; ISBN: 0801482577, Paperback - 252 pages (July 1996) Cornell Univ Pr; ISBN: 0801482577 ; [Table of Contents: 1. Introduction: Benjamin and the Critique of Allegorical Reason by Michael P. Steinberg; 2. The Archaeomodern Turn by Jacques Ranciere; 3. The Allegory of the Philosophy of History in the Nineteenth Century by Heinz-Dieter Kittsteiner; 4. The Benjamin Effect: Modernism, Repetition, and the Path to Different Cultural Imaginaries by Harry D. Harootunian; 5. The Collector as Allegorist: Goods, Gods, and the Objects of History by Michael P. Steinberg; 6. Strolling through the Colonies by Curtis M. Hinsley; 7. Acedia and Melancholia by Francoise Meltzer; 8. Tactics of Remembrance: Proust, Surrealism, and the Origin of the Passagenwerk by Max Pensky; 9. Smashing the Kaleidoscope: Walter Benjamin's Critique of Cultural History by Irving Wohlfarth; 10. "Against the Grain": The Dialectical Conception of Culture in Walter Benjamins's Theses of 1940 by Michael Lowy; 11. Hyphenation: The Spatial Dimensions of Hong Kong Culture by Ackbar Abbas] (Ordering info. from Amazon.com)
On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith [Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1991, ISBN 0-262-69143-4 , 400 pp.]This brilliant collection of essays and recollections remains unsurpassed in the English language. [Table of Contents]
Melancholy Dialetics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning by Max Pensky (1993). Amherst: U of Massachussetts Press.
John McCole. Walter Benjamin and the Antimonies of Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. 329 pp. ISBN 0-8014-9711-6.
Walter Benjamin for Children An Essay on his Radio Years. By Jeffrey Mehlman. 118 p. (1993 ).
Hot Property The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality. By Francoise Meltzer. 172 p. (1994)
Picturing Ourselves Photography and Autobiography. By Linda Haverty Rugg. 286 p. (1997) From the publisher's review: " Because of their experiences under National Socialism, Walter Benjamin and Christa Wolf feared the dangerously objectifying power of photographs and omitted them from their autobiographical writings. Yet Benjamin used them in his photographic conception of history, which had its testing ground in his often-ignored Berliner Kindheit um 1900. And Christa Wolf's narrator in Patterns of Childhood attempts to reclaim her childhood from the Nazis by reconstructing mental images of lost family photographs. "
From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German
Literary Theory by Andrew Bowie, Routledg Paperback, 368pp.,ISBN:
0415127637, Pub. Date: December 1996. From The Publisher: "Literary
theory is now perceived by many people as being in crisis, because some
of its dominant theoretical assumptions are proving hard to sustain. From
Romanticism to Critical Theory offers a new view of literary theory, seeing
it not as a product of the French assimilation of Saussurian linguistics
and Russian Formalism into what we term 'deconstruction', but rather as
an essential part of modern philosophy which begins with the German Romantic
reactions to Kant, the effects of which can be traced through to Heidegger,
Benjamin and Adorno. From Romanticism to Critical Theory argues that key
problems in contemporary literary theory are inseparable from the main
questions of modern philosophy after Kant. In addition to offering detailed
accounts, based on many untranslated texts, of major positions in German
literary theory since the Romantics, this controversial new approach to
literary theory makes fascinating and important links between hermeneutics,
analytical philosophy and literary theory, and will be a vital point of
reference for future work in these areas."
The book also includes a long essay on "Understanding Walter Benjamin." "Bowie argues brilliantly and persuasively for the continued relevance of the romantic project for contemporary thought. . . . In the past few years I have found few books that display such a sovereignty with regard to the most difficult philosophical and aesthetic issues of the past two centuries."---Robert Holub, University of California, Berkeley.
Book Information
& Reviews on-line: in German
" »Die Frage des Aufenthalts im Kriege die Sie anschneiden, ist darum schwer zu beantworten, weil ich kaum damit rechnen kann, in solchem Augenblick, wo man wahrscheinlich ohnehin schon zu spät handelt, gewiß aber binnen weniger Stunden handeln muß, die äußere Möglichkeit zur Durchführung des mir richtig Erscheinenden zu haben. Ich kenne von meiner Nordlandreise her eine Gegend, wo das Leben hart ist, wo man sich aber gesichert nicht nur vor kriegerischen Aktionen, sondern auch vor Hungersnot mit einigem Recht fühlen dürfte. Im europäischen oder mittelmeerischen Zivilisationskreis hätte ich dies Gefühl nirgends.&laqno;
Im Mai 1935 antwortet Benjamin dies auf eine Frage Werner Krafts, der in Palästina lebt und die Befürchtung ausgesprochen hatte, Benjamin könne im Kriegsfalle in ein französisches KZ kommen...."
Benjamin, Walter - F. Hessel, Marcel Proust. Die Herzogin von Guermantes (2 Bde.). Auf den Spuren der verlorenen Zeit, dritter Roman. München, Piper, 1930. 8°, 432 u. 398 S., OLwd., Rücken minim berieben, ansonsten tadellos. Bestellnummer 9095 sFr. 350,- Deutsche Erstausgabe. Übersetzt von Walter Benjamin und Franz Hessel. OR
BENJAMIN, WALTER Der Anfang. Zeitschrift der Jugend. Hrsg. v. Georges Barbizon, Berlin u. Siegfried Bernfeld, Wien. I. Jahr, Heft 1-12 (kompl.) in einem Band. Bln., Verlag Die Aktion 1913/14, 392 S., schlichte priv. Hlwd. 1500,- Bedeutende Jugendzeitschrift mit Themen wie Kulturkampf, Wandervogel, Schulkritik u. -reform, Verhältnis der Geschlechter etc. Enthält die Anfänge von Benjamins literar.-theoretischer Produktion, Aufsätze zur deutschen Jugendbewegung. "Jener 'radikalste Flügel' derselben, der durch den Mitarbeiterkreis der 1913 und 1914 unter den Auspizien von Wyneken hrsg. Zeitschrift 'Der Anfang' gebildet wurde und dem Benjamin angehörte verblieb stets an der Peripherie der Gesamtbewegung" (Benjamin, Ges. Schriften II,3, S.825). Enthält Erstdrucke v. Walter Benjamin unter dem Pseudonym Ardor. Weitere Beiträge v. G.Barbizon, G.Wyneken, W.Ostwald, H.Blumenthal, A.Kurella u.a. Schnitt angerändert, Vorsatz stockig, wenige Braunflecken. Beiliegend ein Flugblatt an die Jugend.
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