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Title:
Walter Benjamin's Archive

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Summary:
The works of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin are a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps and fragments of everyday life, arts and dreams. This beautifully designed book gives an insight into Benjamin's habits of collecting and archiving through some of his most personal documents. From notebooks in which every conceivable space is covered with handwriting, and a heartfelt traveller's series of postcards, to a sequence of Benjamin's own photographs, and lists that include a collection of his son Stefan's early words and sentences, this wonderful collection testifies to Benjamin's complex and kaleidoscopic passion for the ephemera of human life. Illustrated throughout in color and black and white.

Title:
The arcades project

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The Arcades Project is Walter Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history and, in so doing, to liberate the supressed 'true history' that underlay the ideological mask. Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, 'The Arcades Project' (in German: 'Das Passagen-Werk`) was constructed over the course of thirteen years - 'the theater', as Benjamin called it, 'of all my struggles and all my ideas.'

Title:
The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility and other writings on media

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This one-volume gathering of Benjamin's dialectical writing on media of all kinds, ranging from children's literature to cinema, has at its heart the second, most expansive version of his path-breaking essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.' Readers familiar only with partial versions of this piece, where Benjamin began to record the melancholy loss of aesthetic presence at the turn of the twentieth century, will find their understanding transformed-- for this second version, like all the essays and supplemental texts included here, explores a set of latent, utopian possibilities inherent in mechanical means of art-making. Benjamin, the visionary magus of particulars, reveals profoundly, and repeatedly, both the grounds and the consequences of our ever-changing image of the made world. --Susan Stewart

Title:
Sur l'art et la photographie

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Summary:
Trois essais du célèbre philosophe sont regroupés dans ce livre : L'oeuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproductibilité technique (1936), "Du nouveau sur les fleurs" (1928) ainsi que "Peinture et photographie" (1936).

Title:
L'oeuvre d'art � l'�poque de sa reproductibilit� technique

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L��uvre d�art � l��poque de sa reproductibilit� technique annonce, d�s son titre, le tournant op�r� par la modernit� : Benjamin montre dans cet essai lumineux que l�av�nement de la photographie, puis du cin�ma, n�est pas l�apparition d�une simple technique nouvelle, mais qu�il bouleverse de fond en comble le statut de l��uvre d�art, en lui �tant ce que Benjamin nomme son �aura�. Benjamin met au jour les cons�quences immenses de cette r�volution, bien au-del� de la sph�re artistique, dans tout le champ social et politique. Un texte fondamental, dont les �chos ne cessent de se prolonger dans les r�flexions les plus contemporaines. Traduit de l�allemand par Maurice de Gandillac.

Title:
Walking in Berlin

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Summary:
In 'Walking in Berlin', Hessel captures the rhythm of Weimar-era Berlin, recording the seismic shifts in German culture. Nearly all of the essays take the form of a walk or outing, focusing on either a theme or part of the city, and many end at a theater, cinema, or club. 'Walking in Berlin' was a central model for Benjamin’s Arcades Project and remains a classic of “walking literature” that ranges from Surrealist perambulation to Situationist “psychogeography.” This MIT Press edition includes the complete text in translation as well as Benjamin’s essay on 'Walking in Berlin', originally written as a review of the book’s original edition.

Title:
Reflections: essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writings

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A companion volume to "Illuminations", the first collection of Walter Benjamin's writings, "Reflections" presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin. Benjamin moves seamlessly from literary criticism to autobiography to philosophical-theological speculations, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest and most versatile writers of the twentieth century.

Title:
Illuminations: essays and reflections

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Walter Benjamin was an icon of criticism, renowned for his insight on art, literature, and philosophy. This volume 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. "Illuminations" also includes his penetrating study "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his 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 a dark historical era.

Title:
Rue à sens unique, deuxième édition

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Voici un ouvrage d'un genre nouveau, dans lequel Walter Benjamin pratique le collage à la manière de ces amoureux des télescopages poétiques que furent Dada et les surréalistes. 'Rue à sens unique' se compose de notes autobiographiques, de souvenirs d'enfance, d'aphorismes, de scènes de la vie urbaine, de considérations acérées sur l'état du monde, et de l'Allemagne en particulier, mais aussi de réflexions sur l'écriture elle-même, sur la graphologie.

Title:
One-way street

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Summary:
One-Way Street is a thoroughfare unlike anything else in literature?by turns exhilarating and bewildering, requiring mental agility and a special kind of urban literacy. Presented here in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a vein that anticipates later masterpieces such as “On the Concept of History” and The Arcades Project. Composed of sixty short prose pieces that vary wildly in style and theme, One-Way Street evokes a dense cityscape of shops, cafes, and apartments, alive with the hubbub of social interactions and papered over with public inscriptions of all kinds: advertisements, signs, posters, slogans. Benjamin avoids all semblance of linear narrative, enticing readers with a seemingly random sequence of aphorisms, reminiscences, jokes, off-the-cuff observations, dreamlike fantasias, serious philosophical inquiries, apparently unserious philosophical parodies, and trenchant political commentaries. Providing remarkable insight into the occluded meanings of everyday things, Benjamin time and again proves himself the unrivalled interpreter of what he called “the soul of the commodity.” Despite the diversity of its individual sections, Benjamin’s text is far from formless. Drawing on the avant-garde aesthetics of Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism, its unusual construction implies a practice of reading that cannot be reduced to simple formulas. Still refractory, still radical, One-Way Street is a work in perpetual progress.