Books by Walter Benjamin

One of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, Walter Benjamin's groundbreaking essay explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeatedly and what the troubling social and political implications of this are.Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Features 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', 'The Task of the Translator' and 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', as well as essays on Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht's epic theatre, and Proust.

Collected here are "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," discussions of photography and the French writer, and previously untranslated pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, Valery, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.

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Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, 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.

Was heißt eigentlich verstecken? Andrea Sawatzki liest Walter Benjamins unterhaltsame Abhandlung "Der enthüllte Osterhase oder Kleine Versteck-Lehre" über das Eierverstecken zu Ostern.

Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to '33, he wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers the surviving transcripts, which appear here for the first time in English. This eclectic collection demonstrates the range of Benjamin's thinking and his enthusiasm for popular sensibilities. His celebrated ';Enlightenment for Children' youth programs, his plays, readings, book reviews, and fiction reveal Benjamin in a creative, rather than critical, mode. They flesh out ideas elucidated in his essays, some of which are also represented here, where they cover topics as varied as getting a raise and the history of natural disasters, subjects chosen for broad appeal and examined with passion and acuity.Delightful and incisive, this is Walter Benjamin channeling his sophisticated thinking to a wide audience, allowing us to benefit from a new voice for one of the twentieth century's most respected thinkers.

Classic collection of Walter Benjamin's essay, including some of his most celebrated essays

Die wohl bekanntesten Kindheitserinnerungen an das Berlin der Jahrhundertwende: In diesen oft als Skizzen oder Prosaminiaturen bezeichneten Momentaufnahmen lasst Benjamin sein Aufwachsen in einer burgerlichen Familie im Westberliner Bezirk Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf noch einmal Revue passieren. Dabei fugen sich die einzelnen Texte nicht chronologisch zusammen, sondern lassen kleine Erlebnisse - eben die eines Kindes - wieder aufleben.-

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) war ein französischer Schriftsteller und Kritiker. Prousts Hauptwerk ist Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit (À la recherche du temps perdu) in sieben Bänden. Dieser monumentale Roman ist eines der bedeutendsten erzählenden Werke des 20. Jahrhunderts. "Im Schatten der jungen Mädchen" und "Die Herzogin von Guermantes" sind die zwei Teile dieses Werkes. Inhalt: • Im Schatten der jungen Mädchen • Die Herzogin von Guermantes (Band 1&2) • Tage der Freuden: • Der Tod des Baldassar Sylvandre, Freiherrn von Sylvanie • Violante oder die Weltlichkeit • Fragmente einer italienischen Komödie • Weltlichkeit und Melomanie • Trauriger Landaufenthalt der Madame de Breyves • Die Beichte eines jungen Mädchens • Das große Diner • Trauer und Träume in allen Regenbogenfarben • Das Ende der Eifersucht • Im Schatten der jungen Mädchen: Der Roman spielt im Frankreich des Fin de siècle in der gehobenen Gesellschaft. Ein Ich-Erzähler berichtet von seinem Leben und vom Vorgang des Erinnerns. Der Ich-Erzähler stammt aus einer Familie des Pariser Bürgertums, die den Sommer üblicherweise bei Verwandten auf dem Land verbringt. Der Erzähler verbringt die Sommerfrische in dem fiktiven Badeort Balbec, ein Großteil der Handlung spielt im dortigen Grandhotel. Hier verliebt sich der Ich-Erzähler erstmals in die junge Albertine. • Die Herzogin von Guermantes: Der Ich-Erzähler steigt in der Welt des Adels auf und besucht die Salons. Hier macht er sich über das leere Geplauder der Menschen lustig, aber er ist auch fasziniert und kann sich nicht von ihnen trennen, um sein Werk zu schaffen. Die politischen Affären seiner Zeit interessieren ihn kaum. Er bekommt nur mit, dass die Dreyfus-Affäre es manchen Personen erlaubt, gesellschaftlich aufzusteigen, während sie andere zum Abstieg zwingt...

Aus dem Buch: "Die notwendige Richtung aufs Extreme, als welche in philosophischen Untersuchungen die Norm der Begriffsbildung gibt, hat für eine Darstellung vom Ursprung des deutschen Barocktrauerspiels zweierlei zu besagen. Erstens weist sie die Forschung an, unbefangen die Breite des Stoffes ins Auge zu fassen. Angesichts der ohnedies nicht allzu großen Fülle der dramatischen Produktion, soll ihr Anliegen nicht darin bestehen, in ihm, wie die Literaturgeschichte mit Recht dies täte, nach Schulen der Dichter, Epochen des œuvres, Schichten der Einzelwerke zu suchen." Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) war ein deutscher Philosoph, Kulturkritiker und Übersetzer der Werke von Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire und Marcel Proust. Als undogmatisch positionierter Denker und durch die enge Freundschaft zu u. a. Theodor W. Adorno kann er zum assoziierten Wirkungskreis der Frankfurter Schule gerechnet werden.

A new translation of philosopher Walter Benjamin''s work as it pertains to his famous essay, "The Storyteller," this collection includes short stories, book reviews, parables, and as a selection of writings by other authors who had an influence on Benjamin''s work. “The Storyteller” is one of Walter Benjamin’s most important essays, a beautiful and suggestive meditation on the relation between narrative form, social life, and individual existence—and the product of at least a decade’s work. What might be called the story of The Storyteller Essays starts in 1926, with a piece Benjamin wrote about the German romantic Johann Peter Hebel. It continues in a series of short essays, book reviews, short stories, parables, and even radio shows for children. This collection brings them all together to give readers a new appreciation of how Benjamin’s thinking changed and ripened over time, while including several key readings of his own—texts by his contemporaries Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács; by Paul Valéry; and by Herodotus and Montaigne. Finally, to bring things around, there are three short stories by “the incomparable Hebel” with whom the whole intellectual adventure began.

Focusing on the 17th-century play of mourning, Walter Benjamin identifies allegory as the constitutive trope of modernity, bespeaking a haunted, bedeviled world of mutability and eternal transience. In this rigorous elegant translation, history as trauerspiel is the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal.

A beautiful collection of the legendary thinker's short storiesThe 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.

Presented in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture, composed of 60 short prose pieces that vary wildly in style and theme, offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a vein that anticipates later masterpieces.

The life of literary critic and philosopher Benjamin (1892-1940) is a veritable allegory of the life of letters in the 20th century. Benjamin's intellectual odyssey included an eventful trip to the USSR. His stunning account of that journey is unique among his writings for the frank, merciless way he struggles with his motives and his conscience.

This collection of nine essays focuses on those writings of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) on literature and language that have a direct relevance to contemporary literary theory, notably his analyses of myth, violence, history, criticism, literature, and mass media.

The first stirrings of this most original of critical minds-penned during the years when he transformed himself from the comfortable son of a German Jewish family into the nomadic, boundary-crossing philosopher-critic we appreciate-have until now remained largely unavailable in English. Early Writings, 1910-1917 rectifies this situation.

Offers a source of literary modernism in the twentieth century.

Walter Benjamin - philosopher, essayist, literary and cultural theorist - was one of the most original writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. This new selection brings together Benjamin's major works, including 'One-Way Street', his dreamlike, aphoristic observations of urban life in Weimar Germany; 'Unpacking My Library', a delightful meditation on book-collecting; the confessional 'Hashish in Marseille'; and 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', his seminal essay on how technology changes the way we appreciate art. Also including writings on subjects ranging from Proust to Kafka, violence to surrealism, this is the essential volume on one of the most prescient critical voices of the modern age. Contains: 'Unpacking My Library'; 'One-Way Street'; 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'; 'Brief History of Photography'; 'Hashish in Marseille'; 'On the Critique of Violence'; 'The Job of the Translator'; 'Surrealism'; 'Franz Kafka' and 'Picturing Proust'.

In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850.

Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood around 1900 is a recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin's West End at the turn of the century. In this diagram of his life, Benjamin focuses not on persons or events but on places and things, seen from the perspective of a child.