The period 1985-1995 saw a new wave of interest, in philosophical and theoretical circles, in the writings of Walter Benjamin, associate of the early Frankfurt School and among the most innovative and uncategorizable of German modernist thinkers. It is against the horizon of the contemporary theoretical scene, combining impulses from post-structuralism, feminism, cultural anthropology, and psychoanalysis, that Sigrid Weigel, one of Germany's leading Benjamin experts, undertakes her re-reading of his work. The subject of this sequence of eleven essays, assembled here for the first time in English translation, is Benjamin as theorist, whereby his work on thinking in images or UBilddnken and the relation of this to 'the first material of human existence ...the body" is taken as constituting the specificity of his philosophy. Arranged in three sections ( "Politics of Images and Body", "Other - Gender - Readings", and "Memory and Writing") the essays provide a passage into Benjamin's thinking in images.

Masculinist and feminist worldviews in post-1945 German literature, and the possibility of a dynamic reconceptualization of human subjectivity. Rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, modernity tends to privilege masculine-connoted characteristics -- conscious subjective agency, rational control and self-containment, the subjugation of nature -- and has generated a conceptualization of human subjectivity emphasizing these qualities. Yet the costs of this conception of human selfhood are high, and at modernity's most acute moments of historical crisis writers and artists can be seen turning to feminine-connoted figurations -- nature, tradition, myth and spirituality, intuition, relationality, flux. In recent decades studies have examined the cultural crisis of German modernity, notably at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as a crisis of masculinity. Feminist critiques, meanwhile, have viewed cultural history as male-generated and "phallocentric," in need of a feminine corrective. The innovation of this book is to examine these two gendered perspectives side by side, investigating the culturally symbolic significance of gender in post 1945 German language literature via a sequence of paired readings of major, thematically related texts by male and female authors, including Ingeborg Bachmann's novel Malina (1971) and Max Frisch's Mein Name sei Gantenbein (1964); Frisch's Homo Faber (1957) and Christa Wolf's Störfall (1987); Elfriede Jelinek's Die Klavierspielerin and Rainald Goetz's Irre (both 1983); and Heiner Müller's Die Hamletmaschine (1977) and Christa Wolf's Kassandra (1983). Finally, Barbara Köhler's eight-poem cycle "Elektra. Spiegelungen" (written1984-85; published 1991) is considered as offering a way past the "impasse" of the male and female viewpoints. Georgina Paul is University Lecturer in German at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Hilda's College.