The Arcades Project

Benjamin, Walter; Eiland, Howard (translator); McLaughlin, Kevin (translator)

ISBN 10: 067404326X / ISBN 13: 9780674043268

Published by Harvard University Press, 1999

About this Item

Second Printing. Light wear to edges of jacket and a little superficial scuffing. Very light bumping to edges of boards. Interior clean and unmarked. Heavy book, may require extra shipping charges for international orders.

Seller Inventory # ABE-1754416080030

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Arcades Project
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067404326X
• ISBN 13: 9780674043268
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literary Theory, Criticism, & History
  • Philosophy

About this title

Synopsis

To great writers, Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labour 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 13 years - "the theatre," as the author called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas." Focusing on the arcades of 19th century Paris - glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centres of consumerism - Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in 36 categories with descriptive rubrics such as "fashion," "boredom," "dream city," "photography," "catacombs," "advertising," "prostitution," "baudelaire," "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. This book is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of 19th 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.

About the Author

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis. Howard Eiland teaches literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kevin McLaughlin is Assistant Professor of English at Brown University and the author of Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Literature.