The Origin of German Tragic Drama

The Origin of German Tragic Drama PDF

Author: Walter Benjamin

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1789604737

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer and the theatre of Calderon and Shakespeare. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. Georg Lukacs, an opponent of Benjamin's aesthetics, singled out The Origin of German Tragic Drama as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.

Berlin Childhood Around 1900

Berlin Childhood Around 1900 PDF

Author: Walter Benjamin

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780674022225

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Benjamin's recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin's West End at the turn of the century is translated into English for the first time in book form.

Philosophy and Melancholy

Philosophy and Melancholy PDF

Author: Ilit Ferber

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2013-06-12

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 080478664X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book traces the concept of melancholy in Walter Benjamin's early writings. Rather than focusing on the overtly melancholic subject matter of Benjamin's work or the unhappy circumstances of his own fate, Ferber considers the concept's implications for his philosophy. Informed by Heidegger's discussion of moods and their importance for philosophical thought, she contends that a melancholic mood is the organizing principle or structure of Benjamin's early metaphysics and ontology. Her novel analysis of Benjamin's arguments about theater and language features a discussion of the Trauerspiel book that is amongst the first in English to scrutinize the baroque plays themselves. Philosophy and Melancholy also contributes to the history of philosophy by establishing a strong relationship between Benjamin and other philosophers, including Leibniz, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger.

Origin of the German Trauerspiel

Origin of the German Trauerspiel PDF

Author: Walter Benjamin

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2019-02-04

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 0674916360

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Focusing on the 17th-century play of mourning, Walter Benjamin identifies allegory as the constitutive trope of modernity, bespeaking a haunted, bedeviled world of mutability and eternal transience. In this rigorous elegant translation, history as trauerspiel is the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal.

Thinking Allegory Otherwise

Thinking Allegory Otherwise PDF

Author: Brenda Machosky

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0804763801

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"Thinking Allegory Otherwise is a unique collection of essays by allegory specialists and other scholars who engage allegory in exciting new ways." "Not limited to an examination of literary texts and works of art, the essays focus on a wide range of topics, including architecture, philosophy, theater, science, and law. Indeed, all language is allegorical. This collection proves the truth of this statement, but more importantly, it shows the consequences of it. To think allegory otherwise is to think otherwise-forcing us to rethink not only the idea of allegory itself, but also the law and its execution, the literality offigurative abstraction, and the figurations upon which even hard science depends." --Book Jacket.

The Fall of Language

The Fall of Language PDF

Author: Alexander Stern

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2019-04-08

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0674240634

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Known for his essays on culture, aesthetics, and literature, Walter Benjamin also wrote on the philosophy of language. For Alexander Stern, his famously obscure—and, for some, hopelessly mystical—early work contains important insights, anticipating and in some respects surpassing Wittgenstein’s later thinking on the philosophy of language.

Philosophy's Artful Conversation

Philosophy's Artful Conversation PDF

Author: D. N. Rodowick

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2015-01-05

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0674416678

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Theory—an embattled discourse for decades—faces a new challenge from those who want to model the methods of all scholarly disciplines on the sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique character of humanistic understanding.

The Writer of Modern Life

The Writer of Modern Life PDF

Author: Walter Benjamin

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780674022874

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"In this book Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank. More than a series of studies of Baudelaire, these essays show the extent to which Benjamin identifies with the poet and enable him to explore his own notion of heroism."--BOOK JACKET.

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin PDF

Author: _l” Fr”dlander

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-01-15

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0674061691

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.