Free Delivery Over $100
|
|
|||
|
||||
OverviewWalter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography is not merely the most extensive and insightful treatment of Benjamin 's autobiographical writings. Although Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is considered one of the most significant writers and theorists in twentieth-century Western culture, his enigmatic sense of the political has eluded definition. His later work in particular stages a perpetual but little understood confrontation with German fascism. Gerhard Richter shows that Benjamin's engagement with the political cannot be understood in terms of unified concepts and fully deducible theses that can be easily verified or refuted. Rather than explaining his sense of the political, Benjamin enacts it in the movement of his language. Richter traces Benjamin's radical notions of the political through a series of corporeal figures in his often neglected autobiographical writings--the Moscow Diary, the Berlin Chronicle, and the Berlin Childhood around 1900. Each text subtly mobilizes a different trope of anatomy: the body, the ear, and the eye. Richter places these figures into a wide network of references from Benjamin's corpus demonstrating that Benjamin's innovative acts of self-portraiture are inseparable from his analyses of the physiognomy of Weimar culture and German fascism. Benjamin's preoccupation with the body becomes visible as a political struggle that illuminates the relations among the self, history, reading, and language. Benjamin's autobiographies, as Richter shows, negate fascism and its ideology of stable meaning with each turn away from an essential corporeal self. Readers interested in modem German literature and culture, literary and cultural theory, comparative literature, Weimar culture, and fascism will welcome this book. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Gerhard RichterPublisher: Wayne State University Press Imprint: Wayne State University Press Edition: New edition Dimensions: Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.70cm , Length: 22.90cm Weight: 0.509kg ISBN: 9780814330838ISBN 10: 0814330835 Pages: 312 Publication Date: 30 April 2002 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock  The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Language: English Table of ContentsReviewsGerhard Richter's study is so effective that it exceeds its own intentions and opens up an illumination of language in our times as well as in Benjamin's. - Michigan Germanic Studies As the first full-scale study of Benjamin's practice of autobiography in any language, Gerhard Richter's admirable work performs a major scholarly service. - Peter Fenves, Northwestern University This text is magisterial.... [It] renews one's amazement at the power and beauty of Benjamin's thinking. I rate this work very highly. - James Rolleston, Duke University ... a remarkable achievement. - Michael Jennings, Princeton University Author InformationGerhard Richter is associate professor of German and affiliate professor in comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the editor of Benjamin's Ghosts: Interventions in Literary and Cultural Theory. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
||||
