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Walter Benjamin for Children - An Essay on His Radio Years (Hardcover, 2nd)
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Walter Benjamin for Children - An Essay on His Radio Years (Hardcover, 2nd)
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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 forays into fiction. Mehlman superimposes a dual
series of texts dealing with catastrophe, on the one hand, and
fraud, on the other, and allows it to 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 offer an
unexpected byway, on the eve of apocalypse, into Benjamin's
messianic preoccupations. A child's garden of deconstruction, these
twenty-minute talks - from the perspective ofchildhood, 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.
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