No other single author has so commanding a critical presence across so many disciplines within the arts and humanities, in so many national contexts, as Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). The belated reception of his work as a literary critic (dating from the late 1950s) has been followed by a rapid series of critical receptions in different contexts: Frankfurt Critical Theory and Marxism, Judaism, Film Theory, Post-structuralism, Philosophical Romanticism, and Cultural Studies.This collection brings together a selection of the most critically important items in the literature, across the full range of Benjamin's cultural-theoretical interests, from all periods of the reception of his writings, but focusing upon the most recent, to produce a comprehensive overview of the best critical literature.

"Many influential artists today draw on a legacy of 'stealing' images and forms from other makers. The term appropriation is particularly associated with the 'Pictures' generation, centred [sic] on New York in the 1980s; this anthology provides a far wider context. Historically, it reappraises a diverse lineage of precedents - from the Dadaist readymade to Situationist détournement - while contemporary 'art after appropriation' is considered from multiple perspectives within a global context." --back cover.

In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes that his work is “related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it.” For a thinker so decisive to critical literary, cultural, political, and aesthetic writings over the past half-century, Benjamin’s relationship to theological matters has been less observed than it should, even despite a variety of attempts over the last four decades to illuminate the theological elements latent within his eclectic and occasional writings. Such attempts, though undeniably crucial to comprehending his thought, remain in need of deepened systematic analysis. In bringing together some of the most renowned experts from both sides of the Atlantic, Walter Benjamin and Theology seeks to establish a new site from which to address both the issue of Benjamin’s relationship with theology and all the crucial aspects that Benjamin himself grappled with when addressing the field and operations of theological inquiry.

No other single author has so commanding a critical presence across so many disciplines within the arts and humanities, in so many national contexts, as Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). The belated reception of his work as a literary critic (dating from the late 1950s) has been followed by a rapid series of critical receptions in different contexts: Frankfurt Critical Theory and Marxism, Judaism, Film Theory, Post-structuralism, Philosophical Romanticism, and Cultural Studies.This collection brings together a selection of the most critically important items in the literature, across the full range of Benjamin's cultural-theoretical interests, from all periods of the reception of his writings, but focusing upon the most recent, to produce a comprehensive overview of the best critical literature.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) has emerged as one of the leading cultural critics of the twentieth century. His work encompasses aesthetics, metaphysical language and narrative theories, German literary history, philosophies of history, the intersection of Marxism and Messianic thought, urban topography, and the development of photography and film. Benjamin defined the task of the critic as one that blasts endangered moments of the past out of the continuum of history so that they attain new significance. This volume of new essays employs this principle of actualization as its methodological program in offering a new advanced introduction to Benjamin's own work. The essays analyze Benjamin's central texts, themes, terminologies, and genres in their original contexts while simultaneously situating them in new parameters, such as contemporary media, memory culture, constructions of gender, postcoloniality, and theories of urban topographies. The Companion brings together an international group of established and emerging scholars to explicate Benjamin's actuality from a multidisciplinary perspective. Designed for audiences interested in literary criticism, cultural studies, and neighboring disciplines, the volume serves as a stimulus for new debates about Benjamin's intellectual legacy today. Contributors: Wolfgang Bock, Willi Bolle, Dianne Chisholm, Adrian Daub, Dominik Finkelde, Eric Jarosinski, Lutz Koepnick, Vivian Liska, Karl Ivan Solibakke, Marc de Wilde, Bernd Witte Rolf J. Goebel is Distinguished Professor of German and Chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Beginning with the first comprehensive account of the discourse of appropriation that dominated the art world in the late 1970s and 1980s, Art After Appropriation suggests a matrix of inflections and refusals around the culture of taking or citation, each chapter loosely correlated with one year of the decade between 1989 and 1999. The opening chapters show how the Second World culture of the USSR gave rise to a new visibility for photography during the dissolution of the Soviet Union around 1989. Welchman examines how genres of ethnography, documentary and travel are crossed with fictive performance and social improvisation in the videos of Steve Fagin. He discusses how hybrid forms of subjectivity are delivered by a new critical narcissism, and how the Korean-American artist, Cody Choi converts diffident gestures of appropriation from the logic of material or stylistic annexation into continuous incorporated events. Art After Appropriation also examines the creation of public art from covert actions and social feedback, and how bodies participate in their own appropriation. Art After Appropriation concludes with the advent of the rainbow net, an imaginary icon that governs the spaces of interactivity, proliferation and media piracy at the end of the millennium. John Welchman is Professor of Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Modernism Relocated (1995) and Invisible Colors (1997); and editor of Rethinking Borders (1996), and a forthcoming three-volume anthology of the writings of LA artist MIke Kelley. Welchman has contributed to numerous journals, magazines, museum catalogues and newspapers, including Artforum; New York Times; Los Angeles Times; International Herald Tribune; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Gallery; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Reina Sofia, Madrid; Haus der Kunst, Munich

Exploring the connections between Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history and a Marxian Critique of Political Economy, Duy Lap Nguyen analyses Benjamin's early writings and their development into a distinct understanding of historical materialism. Benjamin's historically materialist conception of history is shown to be characterised by a focus on the religion of capitalism, the mythology of the state, and messianic time. Revealing these factors, Nguyen joins up Benjamin's philosophical critique of the Kantian conception of history, alongside the historical trajectory of capitalism he subscribed to. Influenced by the theory of fascism outlined by German Marxist theorist Karl Korsch, we see how Benjamin's own theory of revolution and redemption in capitalist society developed into a sophisticated critique. Essential to Benjamin's materialist critique was a recognition of the fallibility of the Enlightenment notion of progress, as well as the need to overturn the political and economic catastrophes which enable capitalism and fascism to thrive. In mapping the exact course of Benjamin's critical historical materialism, Nguyen fully explicates the unique contribution he made to western Marxism.

No other single author has so commanding a critical presence across so many disciplines within the arts and humanities, in so many national contexts, as Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). The belated reception of his work as a literary critic (dating from the late 1950s) has been followed by a rapid series of critical receptions in different contexts: Frankfurt Critical Theory and Marxism, Judaism, Film Theory, Post-structuralism, Philosophical Romanticism, and Cultural Studies.This collection brings together a selection of the most critically important items in the literature, across the full range of Benjamin's cultural-theoretical interests, from all periods of the reception of his writings, but focusing upon the most recent, to produce a comprehensive overview of the best critical literature.

Illuminations contains the most celebrated work of Walter Benjamin, one of the most original and influential thinkers of the 20th Century: 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', ‘The Task of the Translator’ and 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', as well as essays on Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht's epic theatre, Proust and an anatomy of his own obsession, book collecting. This now legendary volume offers the best possible access to Benjamin’s singular and significant achievement, while Hannah Arendt’s introduction reveals how his life and work are a prism to his times.

Walter Benjamin is often viewed as a cultural critic who produced a vast array of brilliant and idiosyncratic pieces of writing with little more to unify them than the feeling that they all bear the stamp of his "unclassifiable" genius. Eli Friedlander argues that Walter Benjamin's corpus of writings must be recognized as a unique configuration of philosophy with an overarching coherence and a deep-seated commitment to engage the philosophical tradition. Friedlander finds in Benjamin's early works initial formulations of the different dimensions of his philosophical thinking. He leads through them to Benjamin's views on the dialectical image, the nature of language, the relation of beauty and truth, embodiment, dream and historical awakening, myth and history, as well as the afterlife and realization of meaning. Those notions are articulated both in themselves and in relation to central figures of the philosophical tradition. They are further viewed as leading to and coming together in The Arcades Project. Friedlander takes that incomplete work to be the central theater where these earlier philosophical preoccupations were to be played out. Benjamin envisaged in it the possibility of the highest order of thought taking the form of writing whose contents are the concrete time-bound particularities of human experience. Addressing the question of the possibility of such a presentation of philosophical truth provides the guiding thread for constellating the disparate moments of Benjamin's writings.