Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 3
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Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938
Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and Others
Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings
Radical critic of a European civilization plunging into darkness, yet commemorator of the humane traditions of the old bourgeoisie–such was Walter Benjamin in the later 1930s. This volume, the third in a four-volume set, offers twenty-seven brilliant pieces, nineteen of which have never before been translated.The centerpiece, A Berlin Childhood around 1900, marks the first appearance in English of one of the greatest German works of the twentieth century: a profound and beautiful account of the vanished world of Benjamin’s privileged boyhood, recollected in exile. No less remarkable are the previously untranslated second version of Benjamin’s most famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” with its striking insights into the relations between technology and aesthetics, and German Men and Women, a book in which Benjamin collects twenty-six letters by distinguished Germans from 1783 to 1883 in an effort to preserve what he called the true humanity of German tradition from the debasement of fascism....
Read more about: Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 3 »Uncommon People
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These 26 essays reveal the intellectual girders the British Marxist historian used in four decades of publishing social and political analyses in support of common, working people. He shows a sometimes puckish appetite for shattering facile definitions with deadly buckshot, as in his 1952 “The Machine-Breakers,” in which he takes aim at the image of the Luddites as visionless machine haters, instead calling their actions “collective bargaining by riot.” In “Birth of a Holiday,” he cites May Day as an “entirely unofficial movement of poor men and women” celebrated in 107 countries; in an interesting aside he notes that the first May Day in Germany was commemorated by a plaque with Karl Marx on one side and the Statue of Liberty on the other, thereby uniting the socialist labor movement with democracy. With the same combination of insight and trenchant factual digression, Hobsbawm (Age of Extremes 1914-1991) faces the cosmic questions (“Revolution and Sex,” “Peasants and Politics”) as well as powerful individuals such as the mafioso Salvatore Giuliano and Roy Cohn,...
Read more about: Uncommon People »Mixed Reviews
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Eight new long stories — the first collection of new Cometbus stories in more than five years!
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Includes a tour of the United Nations sissions, a walk across the Midwest, a library love story, plus coffee, book and restaurant reviewsThe System Wall Map
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... Read more about: The System Wall Map »The Ring Wall Map
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... Read more about: The Ring Wall Map »Film and Video
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Having already published collections of critical essays on fiction, poetry, performance, politics and visual art, Richard Kostelanetz for the first time selects here from his writings on film and video.
As in earlier volumes, these essays emphasize the primacy of possibilities intrinsic in each medium. Always representing radical alternatives, he writes with uncommon perception not only about familiar issues but about films customarily forgotten, and always with his customary clarity. Also included are prefaces and transcripts from his own films and videos.
He writes: “Another implicit assumption behind my activity is acknowledging the importance of books in collecting together initially scattered opinions, for I have long contended that the critic who fails to risk publishing books is just a reviewing journalist, or, worse, an opportunist.” Celebrating four decades of book-publishing, he remains a prolific force and a unique independent voice.
Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz appear in Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians,...
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