Books by Benjamin Bennett

Conducts a radical criticism of the concept of 'reading,' especially of the concept of 'the' reader, as these concepts are commonly used in literary criticism. This book sketches the historical provenance of 'the' reader, in an argument that includes discussions of Dante, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Marlowe, and German idealist philosophy.

Secular Millenialism: The Train of Aesthetics from Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler by Benjamin Bennett combines the perspectives of intellectual history, literary history, and political history in order to illuminate the operation of the idea of aesthetics, and of the historical actualization of that idea, in the background of twentieth-century totalitarianism.

Professor Bennett examines Hofmannsthal's work in the context of literary theory and the history of philosophy.

All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater is the first book to consider why, in the Western tradition (and only in the Western tradition), theatrical drama is regarded as its own literary or poetic type, when the criteria needed to differentiate drama from...