Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940 Book PDF, ePub eBook

Join our eBook service for unlimited books & audiobooks. Get a free 7 day subscription! ↓↓↓↓↓


Book Descriptions:

"Every line we succeed in publishing today...is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness." So wrote Walter Benjamin in January 1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to flee the Nazis. However insistently the idea of catastrophe hangs over Benjamin's writings in the final years of his life, the "victories wrested" in this period nonetheless constitute some of the most remarkable twentieth-century analyses of the emergence of modern society. The essays on Charles Baudelaire are the distillation of a lifetime of thinking about the nature of modernity. They record the crisis of meaning experienced by a civilization sliding into the abyss, even as they testify to Benjamin's own faith in the written word.

This volume ranges from studies of Baudelaire, Brecht, and the historian Carl Jochmann to appraisals of photography, film, and poetry. At their core is the question of how art can survive and thrive in a tumultuous time. Here we see Benjamin laying out an ethic for the critic and artist--a subdued but resilient heroism. At the same time, he was setting forth a sociohistorical account of how art adapts in an age of violence and repression.

Working at the height of his powers to the very end, Benjamin refined his theory of the mass media that culminated in the final version of his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." Also included in this volume is his influential piece "On the Concept of History," completed just before his death. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the nature of "the modern" (especially as revealed in Baudelaire), for its ideas about the transmogrification of art and the radical discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and thought in the midst of barbarism. The entire collection is eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit of humanity under siege.

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940 by Walter Benjamin

From reader reviews:

Natalie Hernandez:

Do you considered one of people who can't read satisfying if the sentence chained inside the straightway, hold on guys that aren't like that. This Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940 book is readable through you who hate those perfect word style. You will find the information here are arrange for enjoyable reading experience without leaving perhaps decrease the knowledge that want to deliver to you. The writer involving Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940 content conveys the thought easily to understand by many people. The printed and e-book are not different in the information but it just different as it. So , do you even now thinking Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940 is not loveable to be your top list reading book?

Cathy Duran:

Information is provisions for anyone to get better life, information today can get by anyone in everywhere. The information can be a knowledge or any news even an issue. What people must be consider while those information which is from the former life are hard to be find than now is taking seriously which one is acceptable to believe or which one the particular resource are convinced. If you have the unstable resource then you understand it as your main information it will have huge disadvantage for you. All those possibilities will not happen inside you if you take Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940 as the daily resource information.

Charlotte Lee:

Reading can called mind hangout, why? Because when you find yourself reading a book particularly book entitled Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940 your head will drift away trough every dimension, wandering in each aspect that maybe unknown for but surely will become your mind friends. Imaging each and every word written in a reserve then become one application form conclusion and explanation which maybe you never get just before. The Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940 giving you another experience more than blown away your mind but also giving you useful details for your better life on this era. So now let us teach you the relaxing pattern this is your body and mind are going to be pleased when you are finished looking at it, like winning an activity. Do you want to try this extraordinary investing spare time activity?

Olive Griffin:

Reading a book make you to get more knowledge from that. You can take knowledge and information from a book. Book is published or printed or outlined from each source which filled update of news. In this particular modern era like today, many ways to get information are available for you actually. From media social including newspaper, magazines, science e-book, encyclopedia, reference book, novel and comic. You can add your knowledge by that book. Are you hip to spend your spare time to spread out your book? Or just seeking the Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940 when you desired it?