Description
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most celebrated thinkers of the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, critic, historian, an investigator of culture, a maker of radio programmes and more. Notably, in his Arcades Project, he looked into the past of Paris to understand the modern age and, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, examined how the new media of film and photography enabled art to be politicised, and politics to become a form of art. The rise of the Nazis in Germany forced him into exile, and he worked in Paris in dread of what was to come; when his escape from France in 1940 was blocked at the Spanish border, he took his own life.
With Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/profile/8008438/esther-leslie
Kevin McLaughlin, Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English, Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown University https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/provost/people/senior-academic-officers/kevin-mclaughlin
Carolin Duttlinger, Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford https://www.wadham.ox.ac.uk/people/fellows-and-academic-staff/d/carolin-duttlinger
Producer: Simon Tillotson
READING LIST
T.W. Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (Verso, 2020)
Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness (Verso, 2016)
Walter Benjamin (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin), The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999)
Walter Benjamin (trans. Harry Zohn), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (Schocken, 2007), especially the introduction by Hannah Arendt
Walter Benjamin (ed. Lecia Rosenthal), Radio Benjamin (Verso, 2014)
Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings (Penguin, 2009)
Carolin Duttlinger, ‘Walter Benjamin: The Aura of Photography’ (Poetics Today, 29, 2008)
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Harvard University Press, 2016)
Wolfram Eilenberger (trans. Shaun Whiteside), Time of the Magicians: The Invention of Modern Thought, 1919-29 (Penguin, 2021)
David S. Ferris, The Cambridge Introduction to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin - Critical Lives (Reaktion, 2007)
Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla, Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs (Verso, 2015)
RELATED LINKS
‘Walter Benjamin: Fragments, Salvage and Detours’ by Carolin Duttlinger - Times Literary Supplement online, 23 August 2019 https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/walter-benjamin-fragments-salvage-detours/
Walter Benjamin - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin
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