Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

by Beatrice Hanssen (Editor), Andrew Benjamin (Editor)

Overview

One of the most significant cultural documents of the Weimar Republic and Nazi era, Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project has had a remarkable impact on present-day cultural theory, urban studies, cultural studies and literary interpretation. Originally designed as a panoramic study chronicling the rise and decline of the Parisian shopping arcades, Benjamin's work combines imaginative peregrinations through the changing city-scape of nineteenth-century Paris with passages that read like a blueprint for a new cultural theory of modernity.

Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project provides the first comprehensive introduction to this extraordinary work accessible to English-language readers. The diverse range of issues explored include the nature of collecting, the anatomy of melancholy, the flâneur, the physiognomy of ruins, the dialectical image, Benjamin's relation to Baudelaire, the practice of history-writing, and modernity and architecture. Contributors include Susan Buck-Morss, Stanley Cavell, Jonathan Culler, Brigid Doherty, Barbara Johnson, Esther Leslie, Gerhard Richter, Andrew Benjamin, Howard Caygill, Beatrice Hanssen, Detlef Mertins, Elissa Marder, Tyrus Miller, and Irving Wohlfarth

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826463876
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/10/2006
Series:	Walter Benjamin Studies
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

Beatrice Hanssen is Professor of Germanic and Slavic Languages, University of Georgia, USA.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Physiognomy of a Flâneur: Walter Benjamin's Peregrinations in Search of the Dialetical Image, Beatrice Hanssen (University of Georgia)Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonier, Irving Wohlfarth (University of Reims)The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering, Susan Buck-Morss (Cornell Univeristy)
 
Passage Work, Barbara Johnson (Harvard University)
 
Ruin and Rubble in the Arcades, Esther Leslie (Birkbeck, University of London)
 
Geheimmittel: Advertising and Dialectical Images in Benjamin's Arcades Project, Max Pensky (Binghampton, SUNY)
 
A Matter of Distance: Benjamin's One-Way Street through the Arcades, Gerhard Richter (UC Davis)
 
'The Colportage Phenomenon of Space' and the Place of Montage in the Arcades Project, Brigid Doherty (Princeton University)
 
Walter Benjamin's Dream of 'Happiness', Elissa Marder (Emory University)
 
The Dream of Reality in the Ruin, Stathis Gourgouris (UCLA)
 
The Enticing and Threatening Face of Prehistory: Walter Benjamin and the Utopia of Glass, Detlef Mertins (University of Pennsylvania)
 
Glass before its time, premature iron: Architecture, Temporality and dream in Benjamin's Arcades Project, Tyrus Miller (UC Santa Cruz)
 
Remains to be Seen, Stanley Cavell (Harvard University)