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Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and important critical voices of the twentieth century, but until now only a few of his writings have been available in English. Harvard University Press has now undertaken to publish a significant portion of his work in definitive translation, under the general editorship of Michael W. Jennings. This volume, the first of three, will at last give readers of English a true sense of the man and the mans' theets of his thought. A separate volume will consist of his book The Arcades Project, the magnum opus of his Paris years.

The writer Walter Benjamin emerged our of the head-on collision of an idealistic youth movement and the First World War, which Benjamin and his close friends thought immoral. He walked away from the wreck scarred yet determined "to be considered as the principal critic of German literature." But the scene as he found it was dominated by "talented fakes," so-to use his words-"only a terrorist campaign would I suffice" to effect radical change. This book offers the record of the first phase of that campaign, culminating with "One-Way Street," one of the most significant products of the German avant-garde of the Twenties. Against conformism, homogeneity, and gentrification of all life into a new world order, Benjamin made the word his sword.

Volume I of the Selected Writings brings together essays long and short, academic treatises, reviews, fragments, and privately circulated pronouncements. Fully five-sixths of this material has never before been translated into English. The contents begin in 1913, when Benjamin, as an undergraduate in imperial Germany, was president of a radical youth group, and take us through 1926, when he had already begun, with his explorations of the world of mass culture, to emerge as a critical voice in Weimar Germany's most influential journals.

The volume includes a number of his most important works, including "Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin," "Goethe's Elective Affinities," "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism," "The Task of the Translator," and "One-Way Street." He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children's books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as the philosophy of language, symbolic logic, or epistemology. We meet Benjamin the youthful idealist, the sober moralist, the political theorist, the experimentalist, the translator, and, above all, the virtual king of criticism, with his magisterial exposition of the basic problems of aesthetics.

Benjamin's sentences provoke us to return to them again and again, luring us as though with the promise of some final revelation that is always being postponed. He is by turns fierce and tender, melancholy and ebullient; he is at once classically rooted, even archaic, in his explorations of the human psyche and the world of things, and strikingly progressive in his attitude toward society and what he likes to call the organs of the collective (its architectures, fashions, signboards). Throughout, he displays a far-sighted urgency, judging the present on the basis of possible futures. And he is gifted with a keen sense of humor. Mysterious though he may sometimes be (his Latvian love, Asia Lacis, once described him as a visitor from another planet), Benjamin remains perhaps the most consistently surprising and challenging of critical writers.

Customer Reviews (2)

An Excellent Introduction
Walter Benjamin has progressed over the years from an obscure lesser member of the Frankfurt School to a widely read leading member of that obscure school. Aided by such as Hannah Arendt, who introduced him to a wider audience in her writings (and also to me), readers have come to appreciate Benjamin for the beauty of his writing as well as his sharp insight.

This volume, along with its companion, is an excellent introduction to the style and thought of this man who, while out of step with his times, possessed the insight to give those times an original critique.

Possessed of a lively style and free from the Marxist bagge that weighs down his Frankfurt School colleagues such as Adorno and Horkheimer (I think Benjamin owes much more to Heidegger than Marx), Benjamin will hook any reader who takes the time to spend an hour or two with this book. From here it's an easy step to purchase other Benjamin writings, a step I can almost guarantee.

Endlessly fascinating...
While his work is as important as Barthes, Foucault, or Derrida, or any other critic of the 20th Century, Benjamin's work has a mystical quality, a kind of enchantment, that resonates much more than any other critic I have read. It is always human and sensitive, even despite hisdeterminedly impersonal tone.

When I think of Benjamin, I think of Emerson's famous line about Hawthorne - that he was a greater man than any of his works betray. The integrity and character of Walter Benjamin shines through his works, and is an inspiration to anyone who takes literature seriously.

This first volume of Bejamin's complete works is very attractive and welcome. Some of my favorite essays are present, such as his essays on children's literature, and the nature of language. I eagerly await the other two volumes. ... Read more

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From our finest radical literary analyst, a classic study of the great philosopher and cultural theorist.“Eagleton is second to none among cultural critics writing in the English language today.” --Guardian ... Read more

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Walter Benjamin's most famous and influential essay remains The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.Walter Benjamin and the Work of Art is the first book to provide a broad and dedicated analysis of this canonical work and its effect upon core contemporary concerns in the visual arts, aesthetics and the history of philosophy.

The book is structured around three distinct areas: the extension of Benjamin's work; the question of historical connection; the importance of the essay in the development of criticism of both the visual arts and literature.Contributors to the volume include major Benjamin commentators, whose work has very much defined the reception of the essay, and leading philosophers, historians and aesthetician, whose approaches open up new areas of interest and relevance. ... Read more

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"The extraordinary and unique qualities of this correspondence stem from the confrontation, in stages, between two of the most intense and energetic minds of the century."--Fredric R. Jameson, Duke UniversityThe correspondence between Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, which appears here for the first time in its entirety in English translation, must rank among the most significant to have come down to us from that notable age of barbarism, the twentieth century. Benjamin and Adorno formed a uniquely powerful pair. Benjamin, riddle-like in his personality and given to tactical evasion, and Adorno, full of his own importance, alternately support and compete with each other throughout the correspondence, until its imminent tragic end becomes apparent to both writers. Each had met his match, and happily, in the other. This book is the story of an elective affinity. Adorno was the only person who managed to sustain an intimate intellectual relationship with Benjamin for nearly twenty years. No one else, not even Gershom Scholem, coaxed so much out of Benjamin.The more than one hundred letters in this book will allow readers to trace the developing character of Benjamin's and Adorno's attitudes toward each other and toward their many friends. When this book appeared in German, it caused a sensation because it includes passages previously excised from other German editions of the letters--passages in which the two friends celebrate their own intimacy with frank remarks about other people. Ideas presented elliptically in the theoretical writings are set forth here with much greater clarity. Not least, the letters provide material crucial for understanding the genesis of Benjamin's Arcades Project. ... Read more

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In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction -- as close to an autobiography as his readers are likely to get -- Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become.

Using as a springboard an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small-town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier.

McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.Amazon.com Review
Do you really want to listen to a cranky old man ramble on about hischildhood, his heart surgery, his hobbies, his son, and the way things, ingeneral, aren't what they used to be? It turns out you do. In WalterBenjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurtry comes the old pardner, andthe result is apowerful elegy for the lost spaces in American life. He takes as hisstarting point an afternoon he spent at the Dairy Queen in Archer City,Texas,reading the pensées of early 20th-century German philosopher WalterBenjamin. At the time Benjamin was writing, McMurtry's grandparents weresettling dusty reaches of west Texas, and McMurtry crosscuts neatlybetweenBenjamin's spent, smoky Europe and his own grandparents' America: "While mygrandparents were dealing with almost absolute emptiness, both social andcultural, Europe was approaching an absolute (and perhaps intolerable)density." McMurtry demonstrates a confidence almost bordering on naivetéin the way he appropriates the great thinking of Europe and applies it tohis own history. He apologizes neither to the highfalutin Europeans norto the down-home Americans, but makes them lie down together any way he seesfit. This brio makes Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen a thrilling read.

McMurtry's book-length essay loops outward from Archer City toencompass a polemic against computers, a foray into the world of bookcollecting, a family biography, anaccount of his soul-loss after heart surgery, and finally anelegy for the cowboy. This last lament casts a shadow back over what we'veread. Not just over this book, but over McMurtry's whole body ofwork. A man who's lived his whole life in print gives us a glimpse of whathas fed him, and, strangely, it's loss. "Because of when and where I grewup, on the Great Plains just as the herding tradition was beginning to loseits vitality, I have been interested all my life in vanishing breeds."The master of storytelling is finally revealed as a master ofmelancholy. --Claire Dederer ... Read more

Customer Reviews (32)

A relaxed and informative read
From the beginning to the end, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, kept my interest. Unlike his fiction, where it is difficult to determine how McMurtry feels about certain events or people, he is much more transparent in this marvelous book. This compilation of essays on a wide variety of subjects demonstrates his smooth prose, his gift for story-telling, and his obvious love for his family and the region surrounding Archer City. But lest one expects a regional personal narrative, this book has implications far wider than at first appearance. He offers his views on a variety of subjects and holds back very little on the effects of technology, the future of ranching, book-selling, reading, and even a particular parade!

While he wants to be known for his fiction, it is his non-fiction that tends to come across with the most sincerity and honesty. McMurtry's perceptions of people and ability to find pleasure and humor in anecdotal situations is to be admired and embraced. Since a study of history helps us understand the mistakes of the past and progress to the future, in many ways, I felt this book to be a history book with a strong, optimistic spirit for the future.

Certainly one of my favorites, I recommend this highly to anyone. I cannot give it five stars since I am highly selective on the highest rating. You will gain from reading this fine book and will find yourself anxious to learn more about book trading as well as the reminder to love and appreciate your friends and family.

A literate and thoughtful "memoir"
Written when McMurtry was 62, WALTER BENJAMIN AT THE DAIRY QUEEN is probably best classified as a memoir, although it is not presented as such.Rather, the construct (perhaps "artifice" is the more apt word) is McMurtry sitting in the Dairy Queen in hometown Archer City, Texas reading an essay on storytelling by Walter Benjamin, which then prompts McMurtry to reflect on and then pass along some of the stories of his life.This Dairy Queen/Walter Benjamin construct comes across as a tad contrived, maybe a little too self-consciously "artsy," but on the whole the stories McMurtry tells are well worth listening to.

The two principle subjects of the book (tracking, one assumes, the two principle preoccupations of McMurtry's life) are (i) the American West -- including that pocket of the West local to Archer County, Texas where McMurtry grew up and his grandparents were pioneering settlers -- and (ii) books, reading, and writing.Throughout the book, seamlessly interwoven with reflections about larger themes such as the West, the doomed and mythical cowboy, and literature are themes or events personal to McMurtry, such as growing up on a hard-scrabble North Texas ranch, his father, going in his teens to the big city and later Rice University, returns to Archer City relating to "The Last Picture Show", and his quadruple-bypass surgery and its extended psychic aftermath.

I see that previous reviews have characterized McMurtry as "crusty" or "cranky," which in my view does him and the book a disservice.Without any obvious effort to ingratiate himself with the reader, McMurtry comes off as personable and likeable.It is not much of a stretch to envision him actually relating these stories and reflections after the meal around a dining room table or maybe even a campfire (albeit not any Dairy Queen of my experience). Yes, in such circumstances McMurtry probably would tend to monopolize the discussion, but he knows more than most of us and, as his fiction suggests, he is a better storyteller than most.

I vascillate between giving the book 4 or 5 stars.If possible, I would settle on 4.5.Because that's not possible, I am rounding up to 5.

My Nile
Larry McMurtry is, as Proust and Virginia Woolf are to him, my Nile of literature.The quality of his prolific output has been inconsistent, but I find myself constantly returning to his work.Like all writers, McMurtry has his faults.But he is the best I have encountered in warding off, to paraphrase Harold Bloom, that dark inertia to which we are all susceptible.

One of McMurtry's rare pieces of non-fiction, this is an intensely readable book - intentionally so, it seems, following the path of the oral tradition.McMurtry mourns the demise of this tradition, while at the same time seeking to find the positive in the historical developments that have killed it.McMurtry's yarns describe his childhood, his discovery of books, and his bouts with depression, including his ruminations on literature's place in his life, and his life's place in this country's physical, historical, and literary landscape.

All of the tributary themes of the book join together as the book progresses, through McMurtry's own White and Blue Nile of Proust (who I personally like) and Woolf (with whom I have never been able to connect)and into a general inspiration to literature.McMurtry says that he early identified books as the central and stable activity in his life.This book is a testament to the joys and comforts of doing the same.

As close to a personal memoir as we get with McMurtry
Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond by Larry McMurtry. Larry McMurtry was influenced by an essay he first read in a Texas Dairy Queen by Walter Benjamin. The essay he was reading was about the dissipation of memory and the loss of narrative power in fiction today.

Larry McMurtry writes about growing up on a ranch in Archer City, Texas. He shares discovering reading and books as a teen, going to college at Rice University, knowing virtually nothing about literature, transferring to North Texas State University to finish his bachelor's degree as a workaround for a troublesome Rice professor, and then doing his Master's at Rice University.

He tells some about writing, his love for books that leads to his becoming a book scout and antiquarian book dealer. Across from the Archer City court house he has a giant bookstore containing a quarter-million used books, and the dying legacy of the cowboy. He shares little about his personal life except his love for reading and his quadruple bypass surgery which was very traumatic. It may be as close to a personal memoir as we get with McMurtry. The work is well written, wide, but not deep. We do not get to know McMurty at a level most would like to experience.

Read and reviewed by Jimmie A. Kepler.

Very Enjoyable
This sat on my shelf for years and I finally pulled it down. I'm glad I did. He expounds on aging, the west, books, his own writing, and reading. His writing is conversational and comfortable. Very enjoyable! ... Read more

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Gershom Scholem was a teenager when he and Walter Benjaminbecame close friends. Here he illuminates their common engagement withthe Kabbalah and sharp disagreement over Marxism, while registeringhis undying sorrow at Benjamin’s refusal to emigrate to Palestine andhis suicide in 1940. This remarkable memoir is both a portrait of twosearching thinkers and a moving exploration of the meaning offriendship. ... Read more

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A haunting tale of an intellectually daring man, written by another
There are few accounts of 20th-century intellectual history that are as compelling as this. Under Gershom (a.k.a. Gerhard) Scholem's comprehensive and compassionate gaze, Benjamin emerges as a troubled and daring intellect--and human, very human. I first heard about Walter Benjamin in graduate school when everyone was reading "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," but I don't recall hearing about Scholem's memoir. Benjamin impressed me then as someone who saw the evolution of consumer culture--the religion-like qualities of shopping, the attractions of film and photography--long before anyone else. But I don't recall studying the daily life of such a scholar, the ordinary circumstances under which he produced his work; Scholem's account shows us those conditions, the near-complete situation in which Benjamin produced his most influential work.

I was fascinated to learn that Benjamin collected children's books, that he spent a lot of time on the islands of Capri and Ibiza, that he had an "inner relationship to things he owned--books, works of art, or hand-crafted items, often of rustic construction . . ." (47). And, of course, Scholem recounts Benjamin's relationship with other creative men and women of 1920s and '30s Germany, including his wife, Dora. And, then after about 1930, the reader can feel the rise of fascism as these thinkers begin to plan for their future, how they must find a place to live where thinking is possible.

Because Scholem has a fine sense of story development over chronological time, there are many exquisite moments in this book. One narrative arc Scholem pursues was Benjamin's inability to find a university teaching position. Apparently, even during his college years, Benjamin's work was misunderstood; his examining and dissertation committees found him incomprehensible. Scholem quotes a teacher or friend as saying (perhaps ironically) that Benjamin's "intellect cannot be habilitated" (145), that is, he can't fit into the prevailing norms in the university system. Throughout his account, Gerhard Scholem is very clear in telling the reader what he knows about Benjamin, how he knew it, or what he does not know. For many years, Scholem was studying in Palestine and not in personal contact with Benjamin, but in that case their letters tell the tale--in a wonderful way. In fact, long quotations from letters are keys to understanding their relationship.

After reading this memoir, I am reminded that today, even with e-mail and cell phones, people are less intimate, less able to know each other, or less able to develop complex intellectual lives in tandem with other lives. But Weimar Germany--especially after the currency was devalued and social pressures increased--was certainly the place where like-minded people came together, a climate in which tension was at a high pitch. Perhaps some people, like Walter Benjamin, produced their greatest work under those dire conditions--but, alas!--we will never know.

Also, I continue to be in awe of the translator's art, Harry Zohn, in this case.

A great intellectual friendship and a tragic end
This is the story of a friendship between two of the most remarkable intellectual figures of the twentieth century , Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin. It begins in Berlin in 1914 and continues through their separation until Benjamin's tragic death twenty -five years later. Both of them were greatly interested in the historical processes of their times, in philology , in the meaning of signs and symbols, in Socialism, in Zionism. Scholem left Germany for the Jerusalem of pre- state Israel and became a central figure there in the development of the Hebrew University. He became too the great scholar who opened a new field that of Jewish Mysticism. Benjamin hesitated and seemed to always find the way to misfortune. But their conversation and their friendship illuminates fundamental issues of life and thought. This book should be read by everyone for whom the life of the mind is important. ... Read more

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Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is now generally recognized as one of the most original and influential thinkers of this century. In Britain and the United States, in particular, he has acquired a status unlike that of any other German philosopher, as successive generations of readers find their own paths through the endlessly fruitul ambiguities of his work. Now available for the first time in English, Momme Brodersen's Walter Benjamin is the most comprehensive biography so far published, and has been widely acclaimed in its author's native Germany. Brodersen provides a fuller and more coherent account of Benjanin's career than has any previous writer. In telling detail, he recounts Benjamin's emotional and intellectual relaionships and discusses many hitherto neglected aspects of Benjamin's life, including his role as literary critic. Brodersen pays particular attention to Benjamin's childhood and youth, his activities in the radical section of the German Youth Movement, and the formative, irreconcilable influences of idealism, socialism and Zionism. At the same time, he gives a fresh and lucid presentation of Benjamin's written work -- much of which remains unavailable in English -- and of the extraordinary diversity of his ideas and enthusiasms. Thoroughly revised and updated for this English edition, and accompanied by nearly a hundred documentary photographs, this biography, is an essential study of the man who himself remains an indispensable guide to the ruins and enchantments of the twentieth century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Unbias Benjamin
I have yet to read this book, but based on the reviews that say it does not give insight into Benjamin, as an academic..., I am very interested in seeing an account that may or may not fall pray to the narrative.

Very Disappointing
Benjamin deserves much better than this! With so much material to work from, I can't see how the author managed to produce such a dull account of one of the twentieth century's most important thinkers. Benjamin travelled widely, worked outside of academia, experimented with drugs, etc., etc., and generally led anything but a dull life, and certainly not unexamined life. It is the kind of book one should perhaps produce a la Benjamin's own fantasy of a book composed entirely of quotations.

Disappointing
Although it provides much information, the book manages to avoid insight, both into Benjamin's remarkable writing and into his difficult relationships, both human and cultural.It is hard to follow any threadthrough these pages.Its place is on the shelf, as a reference work for biographies we are still expecting.

superficial treatment of life, fails to treat work
Brodersen is a bibliographer, and this tome is a bibliographer's compendium.More troubling than the lack of original research are two lacunae: hisfailure to offer virtually any interpretation of Benjamin'swritings and his consistent misjudgements about Benjamin's motives andrelationships.Whether the Work of Art essay, the Trauerspiel book, or theessay of Goethe's Elective Affinities, texts are for Brodersen no more thandates in a chronicle of events. The abiding enigma of his steel-like bondwith the younger, insistent Scholem, the dearth of information about theParis years, his political and philosophical vacillations, his ambivalencesabout Jewishness and Judaism -- these and other fundamental questions arerarely answered, and if so, then impressionistically.Deeply unsatisfyingare also the stamp-size, poorly reproduced photographs, especially for awork about one of the preeminent visual theorists of the early part of thiscentury. The only serious biographical treatment of Benjamin, howeverfragmentary, stillremains "Benjaminia", regrettably onlyavailable in German. ... Read more

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The life of the German-Jewish literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is a veritable allegory of the life of letters in the twentieth century. Benjamin's intellectual odyssey culminated in his death by suicide on the Franco-Spanish border, pursued by the Nazis, but long before he had traveled to the Soviet Union. His stunning account of that journey is unique among Benjamin's writings for the frank, merciless way he struggles with his motives and conscience.

Perhaps the primary reason for his trip was his affection for Asja Lacis, a Latvian Bolshevik whom he had first met in Capri in 1924 and who would remain an important intellectual and erotic influence on him throughout the twenties and thirties. Asja Lacis resided in Moscow, eking out a living as a journalist, and Benjamin's diary is, on one level, the account of his masochistic love affair with this elusive--and rather unsympathetic--object of desire. On another level, it is the story of a failed romance with the Russian Revolution; for Benjamin had journeyed to Russia not only to inform himself firsthand about Soviet society, but also to arrive at an eventual decision about joining the Communist Party. Benjamin's diary paints the dilemma of a writer seduced by the promises of the Revolution yet unwilling to blinker himself to its human and institutional failings.

Moscow Diary is more than a record of ideological ambivalence; its literary value is considerable. Benjamin is one of the great twentieth-century physiognomists of the city, and his portrait of hibernal Moscow stands beside his brilliant evocations of Berlin, Naples, Marseilles, and Paris. Students of this particularly interesting period will find Benjamin's eyewitness account of Moscow extraordinarily illuminating.

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Two-fold purpose of text
Benjamin's diary entries form a beautiful, lucid account of his trip to Moscow. They attach a personality and a humanness to the amazing scholar. There are a number of reasons someone may want to read this fascinating text.

First, the diary illustrates Benjamin's interactions with Moscow, a major metropolis, and his relationship to urbanism as such. This is particularly interesting if the reader encountered Benjamin's account of the Flaneur in The Arcades Project with some hesitation. In that text, Benjamin evaluates critically the role of the Flaneur, but he leaves some questions as to his method of evaluation and as to his way of experiencing urbanism/Paris. A reader will likely find answers to these sorts of questions in this text.

Second, the diary describes the reception of the Soviet Union by a very prominent Marxist critic. They describe the status of the arts, culture and humanities research meanwhile describing the social climate of Moscow. While they don't contain the unabashed political critique one may wish for, all of the circumstantial evidence can be found here for the basis of his later critiques. The diary itself is an important text within the social history of the Soviet Union. Think of it as a two-month version of Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, for Moscow.

Third, the diary contains an account of Benjamin's affair with Asja, whose mental condition has her hospitalized at the time of Benjamin's visit. This fills in a great deal as to Benjamin's personality and provides a fun intellectual distraction. I often found myself skimming the discussions of Soviet arts/scholarship and Moscow-the-metropolis in search of details about his romance. ... Read more

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In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern masters, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man's-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture.

Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka's sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In Necessary Angels Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past. The angel of the title is first Kafka's: on June 25, 1914, the writer recorded in his diary a dream vision of an angel that turned into the painted wooden figurehead of a ship. In 1940, at the end of his life, Walter Benjamin devoted the ninth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History to a meditation on an angel by the artist Paul Klee, first quoting a poem he had written on that painting. In Benjamin's vision, the figure from Klee becomes an angel of history, sucked into the future by the storm of progress, his face looking back to Eden. Benjamin bequeathed the Klee oil painting to Scholem; it hung in the living room of Scholem's home on Abarbanel Street in Jerusalem until 1989, when his widow placed it in the Israel Museum.

Alter's focus on the epiphanic force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. Necessary Angels itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past.

Customer Reviews (1)

A masterwork of cultural and literary criticism
Alter is one of the most distinguished of all modern literary critics. Perhaps he is best known for his pioneering literary studies on the Bible. But he has written on diverse subjects from American- Jewish Literature to Fielding and the Comic Novel. Here he examines the relations of three giants of Jewish and world culture, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka. Kafka had enormous influence on both Scholem and Benjamin who were close friends and influenced each other intellectually.
This work is a master work in cultural and literary criticism. ... Read more

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In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern masters, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man's-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture.

Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka's sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In Necessary Angels Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past. The angel of the title is first Kafka's: on June 25, 1914, the writer recorded in his diary a dream vision of an angel that turned into the painted wooden figurehead of a ship. In 1940, at the end of his life, Walter Benjamin devoted the ninth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History to a meditation on an angel by the artist Paul Klee, first quoting a poem he had written on that painting. In Benjamin's vision, the figure from Klee becomes an angel of history, sucked into the future by the storm of progress, his face looking back to Eden. Benjamin bequeathed the Klee oil painting to Scholem; it hung in the living room of Scholem's home on Abarbanel Street in Jerusalem until 1989, when his widow placed it in the Israel Museum.

Alter's focus on the epiphanic force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. Necessary Angels itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past.

Customer Reviews (1)

A masterwork of cultural and literary criticism
Alter is one of the most distinguished of all modern literary critics. Perhaps he is best known for his pioneering literary studies on the Bible. But he has written on diverse subjects from American- Jewish Literature to Fielding and the Comic Novel. Here he examines the relations of three giants of Jewish and world culture, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka. Kafka had enormous influence on both Scholem and Benjamin who were close friends and influenced each other intellectually.
This work is a master work in cultural and literary criticism. ... Read more

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This collection explores Walter Benjamin's contributions to philosophy, and in particular, Benjamin's "philosophy directed against philosophy." The essays address several aspects of Benjamin's writings, from his early work on the philosophy of art and language, to his cultural criticism, up to his final reflections on the concept of history. Benjamin's understanding of history\Mas defined by his ideas on time and his belief in the destruction of false continuity\Mmakes an invaluable contribution to recent debates on postmodernist views of modernity.

Contributors: Andrew Benjamin, Rebecca Comay, Howard Caygill, Alexander Garcia Duttman, Rodolphe Gasche, Werner Hamacher, Gertrud Koch, John Kraniauskas, Peter Osborne, Irving Wohlfarth. ... Read more

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Walter Benjamin's essays on the great French lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity and modernism as well. 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. The Baudelaire who steps forth from these pages is the flâneur who affixes images as he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes. He is in every instance the modern artist forced to commodify his literary production: "Baudelaire knew how it stood with the poet: as a flâneur he went to the market; to look it over, as he thought, but in reality to find a buyer." Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank.

The introduction to this volume presents each of Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire in chronological order. The introduction, intended for an undergraduate audience, aims to articulate and analyze the major motifs and problems in these essays, and to reveal the relationship between the essays and Benjamin's other central statements on literature, its criticism, and its relation to the society that produces it.

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Selected for honorable mention for the Morris D. Forkosch Prize in intellectual history, awarded annually by the Journal of the History of Ideas

"This sophisticated yet reader-friendly study represents a significant advance in American criticism on Walter Benjamin. . . . I endorse Irving Wohlfarth's statement that this is 'the best book-length study of Benjamin yet to have appeared in English' and enthusiastically recommend it to novice and devotee alike."--Philosophy and Literature ... Read more

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We must see to it that we put the best of ourselves in our letters; for there is nothing to suggest that we shall see each other again soon. So wrote Walter Benjamin to Gretel Adorno in spring 1940 from the south of France, shortly before he took his own life.

The correspondence between Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin, published here in its complete form for the first time, is the document of a great friendship that existed independently of Benjamin's relationship with Theodor W. Adorno. While Benjamin, alongside his everyday worries, writes especially about those projects on which he worked so intensively in the last years of his life, it was Gretel Karplus-Adorno who did everything in her power to keep Benjamin in the world.

She urged him to emigrate and told him about Adorno's plans and Bloch's movements, thus maintaining the connection between the old Berlin friends and acquaintances. She helped him through the most difficult times with regular money transfers, and organized financial support from the Saar region, which was initially still independent from the Third Reich. Once in New York, she attempted to entice Benjamin to America with her descriptions of the city and the new arrivals from Europe though ultimately to no avail. ... Read more

Product Description

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts.

In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers.

Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.

Customer Reviews (1)

Beware of the translation
Harvard is doing non-German speakers a great service by compiling all of these essential essays in chronological order. I am baffled, however, that some of the translations are so inaccurate. Non-German readers should know that there are egregious errors in some of these translations, especially those by Rodney Livingstone. I have compared one of his translations closely with the original German and was shocked to find so many inaccuracies. In one sentence Livingstone translates into English the *exact* opposite of what Benjamin actually writes. He doesn't just get the wrong word (as he does elsewhere); he composes a sentence that is the precise negation of what Benjamin wrote. This is very worrisome and does not bode well for the rest of the volume. I have not closely compared the majority of the volume to the original-- I don't have the time for that. But from the little evidence I found in just a few hours it looks bad indeed. ... Read more

Product Description
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who seems made of flesh rather than marble. In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson shows how the most fascinating of America's founders helped define our national character.In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin's life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and back, Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the spunky runaway apprentice who became, during his 84-year life, America's best writer, inventor, media baron, scientist, diplomat, and business strategist, as well as one of its most practical and ingenious political leaders. He explores the wit behind Poor Richard's Almanac and the wisdom behind the Declaration of Independence, the new nation's alliance with France, the treaty that ended the Revolution, and the compromises that created a near-perfect Constitution.Above all, Isaacson shows how Franklin's unwavering faith in the wisdom of the common citizen and his instinctive appreciation for the possibilities of democracy helped to forge an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class.About the AuthorWalter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and of Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (243)

Excellent, excellent, excellent!
This book is an incredible read and recommended for anyone interested in history, our founding fathers and current politics.

Benjamin Franklin:Great American Super Hero
Mark LaMoure,Boise, ID

PHENOMENAL MAN
I found author Walter Issacson's "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life"to be a 5 Gold Star, captivating book filled with inspiration.Mr. Issacson writes about Franklin's brilliant genius as a nation builder, incredible leader, outstanding political activist, genius inventor, defying rebel and sage the likes of which the world has rarely seen.Benjamin Franklin was an unparalleled founding father who lived 1706 to 1790, during the 13 Colonies, helping build the foundation of the United States of America.

EXCEPTIONAL
Issacson's book is a masterpiece biography and impressive from cover-to-cover.Benjamin Franklin's achievements are clearly some of the most admirable of anyone in world history.Franklin's signature was the only one written on all 5 key documents that founded the U.S.And look at the power of his results:The United States of America!Today (2010) the U.S. is a country of 310 million people and one of the most powerful country's on earth in many, generous ways.Like a diamond, Benjamin was a sparkling, multifaceted man.Franklin was never an elite, with an easy path, paved with gold being born into blueblood royalty.He was the world's first genius advocating the power of the middle class in America.

BRILLIANT ACHIEVEMENT
You'll discover Franklin was a wise and deeply insightful.He was a super mastermind, or a "Polymath."Franklin succeeded in everything he attempted to do in business, journalism, printing, writing, science, politics and diplomacy.Benjamin's business expertise was extraordinary.He would have been worth an estimated 2 billion dollars minimum, in today's money.Franklin's ability in politics showed he was an incredible pragmatist v.s. political or religious zealot.He was an example from which countless American leaders of today could learn a lot.

HIGH ACCOMPLISHMENT
Benjamin established the outstanding University of Pennsylvania.He made the scientific discovery that lightening was electricity.Franklin would have earned at least one of today's Nobel Peace Prizes in Physics for his writing's on electricity.Benjamin Franklin was the first to invent bifocal glasses.He created the first Postal Service and Fire Department.Franklin was the first President of the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society against slavery.These major achievements are only a tiny few of his Herculean successes.Today, his incredible inventions and achievements bless people in Americaand worldwide on a daily basis.

WELL WRITTEN BOOK
You'll enjoy reading Issacson's book.When you finish the book, you'll feel like you personally know Benjamin Franklin.Franklin lived one of those lives that leaves you amazed, astonished and surprised.The book is tremendously exciting and highly educational.Buy it - you will love it.

Walter Isaacson
This is the third biography I have read by Isaacson and I have loved them all.
Once again he creates a deep and amazing experience for the reader to really delve into the subject's story.
I also loved Einstein and Kissinger by Isaacson.

American Life; American Hero
After reading this brilliantly researched and written biography...I concluded that if there never was a Benjamin Franklin, there would be no United States of America.Ben Franklin was truly an American hero.And so is Walter Isaacson, for bringing this poignant realization to those of us who have so profoundly benefited from the genius, pragmatism, creativity, and character of this unparalleled founding father and human being.

Everything but a poet (4.5 stars)
Everyone knows good ol' Ben Franklin, the guy who flew a kite in a storm and 'discovered' electricity.Unfortunately, we don't often know much else of what he did, except that he was one of the "Founding Fathers."More than once, while reading this book, someone said to me, "oh yeah, didn't he write the Declaration of Independence?"Um, no.

Benjamin Franklin was a printer, and he made such a good living that he was able to retire from it when he was 40 years old.He published "Poor Richard's Almanac" which included so many aphorisms and popular sayings that a great many of them are still in use today.He started volunteer fire departments and lending libraries and service clubs, and pushed for improvements such as paved streets.He was the postmaster for the colonies and greatly improved the system of mail delivery.He served in many government positions and argued for preserving the freedoms of the citizens.He was an old man by the time war was declared but influenced Thomas Jefferson's writing of the Declaration of Independence and signed it.In fact, he was the only one to sign (and profoundly influence) the four most important documents that began this nation: the Declaration of Independence, the treaty with France for their support of the colonies (while he served as ambassador there), the treaty with England to end the war, and the Constitution.In addition, his scientific contributions over his lifetime made him the foremost American thinker and earned the admiration and friendship of the greatest European minds of the time.

I used to work for the Franklin Day Planner company (long before the merger with Stephen Covey) and they practically idolized his philosophies for self-improvement, turning them into a successful business to help people gain better control over their time and lives (I still consider it one of the best companies I've ever worked for).But as Walter Isaacson points out so well, Franklin was so much more than just one character trait.He consciously worked on improving himself in many ways.He may not have had much success with humility (he couldn't help but take pride in his accomplishments) and he certainly wasn't a decent husband and father to his own family (preferring the surrogate families he surrounded himself with in England and France on his excessively long stays there) but his other accomplishments were many.Although initially reluctant to break ties with England, once he made up his mind there was no turning back and he was as essential to independence as any of the founding fathers.

Isaacson numbers his shortcomings along with his successes and presents a fairly well-balanced portrait of this giant of a man, and makes it all very readable and even entertaining.He addresses the critics of Franklin through the years, such as the "Romantics" of the early 19th century who complained about his folksy image and championship of middle class values (Herman Melville grudgingly called Franklin "everything but a poet"), and since his day Franklin and his thinking has drifted in and out of style.We may not always recognize the pervasive ways he's influenced society today, but he's always there. ... Read more