Rolf J. Goebel 
A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin 

An advanced introduction to Benjamin’s work and its actualization for our own times.


Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) has emerged as one of the leading cultural critics of the twentieth century. His work encompasses aesthetics, metaphysical language and narrative theories, German literary history, philosophies of history, the intersection of Marxism and Messianic thought, urban topography, and the development of photography and film. Benjamin defined the task of the critic as one that blasts endangered moments of the past out of the continuum of history so that they attain new significance. This volume of new essays employs this principle of actualization as its methodological program in offering a new advanced introduction to Benjamin’s own work. The essays analyze Benjamin’s central texts, themes, terminologies, and genres in their original contexts while simultaneously situating them in new parameters, such as contemporary media, memory culture, constructions of gender, postcoloniality, and theories of urban topographies. The
Companion brings together an international group of established and emerging scholars to explicate Benjamin’s actuality from a multidisciplinary perspective. Designed for audiences interested in literary criticism, cultural studies, and neighboring disciplines, the volume serves as a stimulus for new debates about Benjamin’s intellectual legacy today.


Contributors: Wolfgang Bock, Willi Bolle, Dianne Chisholm, Adrian Daub, Dominik Finkelde, Eric Jarosinski, Lutz Koepnick, Vivian Liska, Karl Ivan Solibakke, Marc de Wilde, Bernd Witte


Rolf J. Goebel is Distinguished Professor of German and Chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

表中的内容

Benjamin’s Criticism of Language and Literature – Wolfgang Bock

The Presence of the Baroque: Benjamin’s
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels in Contemporary Contexts – Dominik Finkelde

Lost Orders of the Day: Benjamin’s
Einbahnstraße – Wolfgang Bock

Literature as the Medium of Collective Memory: Reading Benjamin’s
Einbahnstraße, ‘Der Erzähler, ‘ and ‘Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire’ – Bernd Witte

Benjamin in the Age of New Media – Lutz Koepnick

One Little Rule: On Benjamin, Autobiography, and Never Using the Word ‘I’ – Eric Jarosinski

The
Passagen-Werk Revisited: The Dialectics of Fragmentation and Reconfiguration in Urban Modernity – Karl Ivan Solibakke

Benjamin’s Politics of Remembrance: A Reading of the Theses Contained in ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’ – Marc de Wilde

The Legacy of Benjamin’s Messianism: Giorgio Agamben and other Contenders – Vivian Liska

Paris on the Amazon?: Postcolonial Interrogations of Benjamin’s European Modernism – Willi Bolle

Benjamin’s Gender, Sex, and Eros – Dianne Chisholm

Sonic Dreamworlds: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Phantasmagoria of the Opera House – Adrian Daub

关于作者

Karl Ivan Solibakke is Associate Professor of German and Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences for Budget and Long-Range Planning at Syracuse University.