Illuminations. This item is unavailable.Illuminations

Walter Benjamin was one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century. Illuminations includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and Benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin's life in dark times. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times.

Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin in July 1832 into a prosperous Jewish family. As a student, he came under the influence of Messianic and cabbalistic ideas, and produced a brilliant, esoteric thesis on German baroque drama, which contrived to fail to win him academic tenure. Thereafter, he made a precarious living as a literary journalist, and, under the influence of Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács. Turned towards Marxism; in the late 1920s, he befriended, and championed, Bertolt Brecht. Driven from Germany in 1933 by the political triumph of the Nazis, he went to Paris, where he immersed himself in Surrealism and the study of Baudelaire. When the Wehrmacht rolled into Paris too, in 1940, he fled for the Spanish border, only to doe by his own hand in a tragic-comic fashion at the age of forty-eight.<BR>His literature legacy is greater in stature than in size: he published only two full-scale books in his lifetime, one thesis The Origin of German tragic Drama, the other The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism. Three other books since made available are Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, Moscow Diary and Understanding Brecht. Besides these, he was the author of two books of collected reflections, One-Way Street and A Berlin Childhood Around 1900, and numerous literary and critical essays and commentaries, the finest among them collected in the present volume.