Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940

Benjamin, Walter; Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Others; Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings

ISBN 10: 0674010760 / ISBN 13: 9780674010765

Published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003

About this Item

Hardcover with dustjacket : fine minus / fine. Book: spine slightly slanted and a minor bump to lower back corner of binding. Jacket: almost like new. Size: 8vo - over 7¾ - 9¾" tall.

Seller Inventory # 132899

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940
• Publisher: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
• Publication Date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0674010760
• ISBN 13: 9780674010765
• Binding: Hard Cover with Dustjacket
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Fine-
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Book Type: Book
• Seller catalogs:
  • Philosophy / Essays / Quotes

About this title

Synopsis

"Every line we succeed in publishing today ...is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness". So wrote Walter Benjamin in January 1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to flee the Nazis. However insistently the idea of catastrophe hangs over Benjamin's writings in the final years of his life, the "victories wrested" in this period nonetheless constitute some of the most remarkable 20th-century analyses of the emergence of modern society. The essays on Charles Baudelaire are the distillation of a lifetime of thinking about the nature of modernity. They record the crisis of meaning experienced by a civilization sliding into the abyss, even as they testify to Benjamin's own faith in the written word. This volume ranges from studies of Baudelaire, Brecht, and the historian Carl Jochmann to appraisals of photography, film and poetry. At their core is the question of how art can survive and thrive in a tumultuous time. Here we see Benjamin laying out an ethic for the critic and artist - a subdued but resilient heroism. At the same time, he was setting forth a sociohistorical account of how art adapts in an Working at the height of his powers to the very end, Benjamin refined his theory of the mass media that culminated in the final version of his essay "The Work of Art in the Ages of its Technological Reproducibility". Also included in this volume is his influential piece "On the Concept of History", completed just before his death. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the nature of "the modern" (especially as revealed in Baudelaire), for its ideas about the transmogrification of art and the radical discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and thought in the midst of barbarism. The entire collection is eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit of humanity under siege.

About the Author

HOWARD EILAND is Lecturer in Literature at MIT, as well as coeditor and cotranslator of Benjamin's Arcades Project (Harvard). MICHAEL W. JENNINGS is Professor of German, Princeton University.