One-Way Street is a thoroughfare unlike anything else in
literature-by turns exhilarating and bewildering, requiring mental
agility and a special kind of urban literacy. Presented here in a
new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on
the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture offers a fresh
opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and
experimental, writing in a vein that anticipates later masterpieces
such as "On the Concept of History" and The Arcades Project.
Composed of sixty short prose pieces that vary wildly in style and
theme, One-Way Street evokes a dense cityscape of shops, cafes, and
apartments, alive with the hubbub of social interactions and
papered over with public inscriptions of all kinds: advertisements,
signs, posters, slogans. Benjamin avoids all semblance of linear
narrative, enticing readers with a seemingly random sequence of
aphorisms, reminiscences, jokes, off-the-cuff observations,
dreamlike fantasias, serious philosophical inquiries, apparently
unserious philosophical parodies, and trenchant political
commentaries. Providing remarkable insight into the occluded
meanings of everyday things, Benjamin time and again proves himself
the unrivalled interpreter of what he called "the soul of the
commodity." Despite the diversity of its individual sections,
Benjamin's text is far from formless. Drawing on the avant-garde
aesthetics of Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism, its unusual
construction implies a practice of reading that cannot be reduced
to simple formulas. Still refractory, still radical, One-Way Street
is a work in perpetual progress.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
