Authors: Michael P. Steinberg
ISBN-13: 9780801482571, ISBN-10: 0801482577
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Date Published: July 1996
Edition: New Edition
This book is the first to consider the presence of history and the question of historical practice in Walter Benjamin's work.Some of the essays analyze Benjamin's writings in cultural history and the philosophy of history. Others connect his historical and theoretical practices to issues in contemporary feminism and post-colonial studies, and to cultural contexts including the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. In different ways, the authors all find in Benjamin's specific notion of historical materialism a dialectic between textual and cultural analysis which can reinvigorate the relation between literary and historical studies.
1 | Introduction: Benjamin and the Critique of Allegorical Reason | 1 |
2 | The Archaeomodern Turn | 24 |
3 | The Allegory of the Philosophy of History in the Nineteenth Century | 41 |
4 | The Benjamin Effect: Modernism, Repetition, and the Path to Different Cultural Imaginaries | 62 |
5 | The Collector as Allegorist: Goods, Gods, and the Objects of History | 88 |
6 | Strolling through the Colonies | 119 |
7 | Acedia and Melancholia | 141 |
8 | Tactics of Remembrance: Proust, Surrealism, and the Origin of the Passagenwerk | 164 |
9 | Smashing the Kaleidoscope: Walter Benjamin's Critique of Cultural History | 190 |
10 | "Against the Grain": The Dialectical Conception of Culture in Walter Benjamins's Theses of 1940 | 206 |
11 | Hyphenation: The Spatial Dimensions of Hong Kong Culture | 214 |
Contributors | 233 | |
Index | 237 |