Walter Benjamin by Esther Leslie

Walter Benjamin by Esther Leslie

Walter Benjamin, critic, essayist, translator, philosopher one of the twentieth century's most influential intellectuals continues to intrigue. This book acknowledges Benjamin's thesis that personal histories can be traced only in the context of social milieus, economic forces, technological shifts, and historical events.

.. 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

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: Critical Theory, Animation and the Avant-garde (2002) Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005), and the editor and translator of On Photography by Walter Benjamin (Reaktion, 2015).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781861893437
ISBN 10	1861893434
Title	Walter Benjamin
Author	Esther Leslie
Series	Critical Lives
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Reaktion Books
Year published	2007-09-01
Number of pages	192
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.