1: Walter Benjamin’s Criticism of Language and Literature

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Preface vii
4. Sources of Benjamin’s Works ix
5. Chronology of Benjamin’s Major Works xi
6. Introduction: Benjamin’s Actuality 1
7. 1: Walter Benjamin’s Criticism of Language and Literature 23
8. 2: The Presence of the Baroque: Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels in Contemporary Contexts 46
9. 3: Lost Orders of the Day: Benjamin’s Einbahnstraße 70
10. 4: Literature as the Medium of Collective Memory: Reading Benjamin’s Einbahnstraße, “Der Erzähler,” and “Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire” 91
11. 5: Benjamin in the Age of New Media 112
12. 6: One Little Rule: On Benjamin, Autobiography, and Never Using the Word “I” 130
13. 7: The Passagen-Werk Revisited: The Dialectics of Fragmentation and Reconfiguration in Urban Modernity 153
14. 8: Benjamin’s Politics of Remembrance: A Reading of “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” 177
15. 9: The Legacy of Benjamin’s Messianism: Giorgio Agamben and Other Contenders 195
16. 10: Paris on the Amazon? Postcolonial Interrogations of Benjamin’s European Modernism 216
17. 11: Benjamin’s Gender, Sex, and Eros 246
18. 12: Sonic Dreamworlds: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Phantasmagoria of the Opera House 273
19. Select Bibliography and List of Further Reading 295
20. Notes on the Contributors 299
21. Index 303