Walter Benjamin

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Walter Benjamin
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Esther Leslie
SeriesCritical Lives
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:192
Category/GenreBiographies and autobiography
ISBN/Barcode 9781861893437
ClassificationsDewey:193
Audience
General

Publishing Details

Publisher Reaktion Books
Imprint Reaktion Books
Publication Date 1 September 2007
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

Walter Benjamin, critic, essayist, translator, philosopher - one of the twentieth century's most influential intellectuals - continues to intrigue today. His work stimulates a profusion of responses in the form of new novels, operas, films and artworks, as well as a never-abating production of academic texts. In this biography, author Esther Leslie uses the recently published entirety of Benjamin's correspondence, drawing on his numerous diaries and autobiographical works, in order to provide a careful account of his circumstances and thoughts.

Author Biography

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (2000), Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002), and Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion Books, 2005).

Reviews

... a brilliant digest of Benjamin's life ... It draws on a mass of texts, including his accounts of a privileged Berlin upbringing and travel diaries. [Leslie] presents a definitive portrait of Benjamin the materialist, lingers on his obsession with children's books, and makes excellent use of German sources to detail his movements and finances. The Independent Leslie has inhaled the author of The Arcades Project as Kazin inhaled Blake. Benjamin, in fact, seems more coherent in her page than in his own ... It is as if, by evoking the tactile vitality of all that he touched with his thought, Leslie brings him back alive and kicking from the last border he crossed. Argue if you wish with his idea of "aura," his "hierarchies of meaning," or whether mechanical reproduction is good for the masses. But the mind that put Kafka and Chaplin into the same conceptual frame is his very own Klee painting, an Angelus Novus - the angel of history. -- John Leonard Harper's Magazine