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Walter Benjamin discusses whether art is diminished by the modern
culture of mass replication, arriving at the conclusion that the
aura or soul of an artwork is indeed removed by duplication. In an
essay critical of modern fashion and manufacture, Benjamin decries
how new technology affects art. The notion of fine arts is
threatened by an absence of scarcity; an affair which diminishes
the authenticity and essence of the artist's work. Though the
process of art replication dates to classical antiquity, only the
modern era allows for a mass quantity of prints or mass production.
Given that the unique aura of an artist's work, and the reaction it
provokes in those who see it, is diminished, Benjamin posits that
artwork is much more political in significance. The style of modern
propaganda, of the use of art for the purpose of generating raw
emotion or arousing belief, is likely to become more prevalent
versus the old-fashioned production of simpler beauty or meaning in
a cultural or religious context.
"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works
weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire
lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when
Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in
German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously
constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as
Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."
Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed
rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin
presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds
of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with
descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City,"
"Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution,"
"Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation
is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which
he locates the decisive shift to the modern age. The Arcades
Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the
bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so
doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the
ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and
interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic
distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from
what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost
time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.
Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential
essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition
presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated
translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of
modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and
fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the
contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus
encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about
law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich
Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from
Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates
Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the
first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the
expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding
philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide
additional context. With its challenging argument concerning
violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters
as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of
religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its
publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.
A beautiful collection of the legendary thinker's short stories The
Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary
critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his
groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including
Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories
revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold
between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance
of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling
and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin.
The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in
this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the
modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee.
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Aesthetics and Politics (Paperback)
Fredric Jameson; Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, …
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R310
R283
Discovery Miles 2 830
Save R27 (9%)
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No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of
major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in
German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and
Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over
literature and art during these years are assembled in a single
volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous,
interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of
twentieth-century intellectual history.
Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential
essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition
presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated
translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of
modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and
fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the
contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus
encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about
law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich
Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from
Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates
Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the
first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the
expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding
philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide
additional context. With its challenging argument concerning
violence, law, and justice-which addresses such topical matters as
police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of
religion-Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its
publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.
Benjamin's famous "Work of Art" essay sets out his boldest
thoughts--on media and on culture in general--in their most
realized form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of
everyone who reads it. In this essay the visual arts of the machine
age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images,
gestures, and thought.
This essay, however, is only the beginning of a vast collection
of writings that the editors have assembled to demonstrate what was
revolutionary about Benjamin's explorations on media. Long before
Marshall McLuhan, Benjamin saw that the way a bullet rips into its
victim is exactly the way a movie or pop song lodges in the
soul.
This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four
versions of the "Work of Art" essay--the one that addresses the
utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks
Benjamin's observations on the media as they are revealed in essays
on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and
photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and
painting. The volume contains some of Benjamin's best-known work
alongside fascinating, little-known essays--some appearing for the
first time in English. In the context of his passionate engagement
with questions of aesthetics, the scope of Benjamin's media theory
can be fully appreciated.
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