Illuminations: Essays and Reflections by Walter Benjamin. New York. 1968. Harcourt Brace & World. Translated from the German by Harry Zohn. 280 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Ken Braren.
DESCRIPTION - Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940, a German-Jewish man of letters, was known to the discerning few as one of the most acute and original critical and analytical minds of his time. His work consisted of literary essays, general reflections, aphorisms, and probings into cultural phenomena. He achieved posthumous fame when a collected edition of his writings appeared in Germany fifteen years after his death. ILLUMINATIONS is the first publication, in English, of a selection from Benjamin's writings. It includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt the closest personal affinity, his studies on Baudelaire and Proust, both of whom he translated, his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his noted, penetrating study on ‘Time Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,'' a cultural assessment of time interrelation of art, technology, and mass society, an illuminating discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his theses on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and prefaced them with a substantial, admirably informed Introduction that presents Benjamin's personality and intellectual development as well as his work and his life in dark times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892 - 26 September 1940) was a German literary critic, philosopher, social critic, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. Combining elements of German idealism or Romanticism, Historical Materialism and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism, and is associated with the Frankfurt School. Among his major works as a literary critic are essays on Goethe's novel Elective Affinities; the work of Franz Kafka and Karl Kraus; translation theory; the stories of Nikolai Leskov; the work of Marcel Proust and perhaps most significantly, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose critical aesthetics developed epic theatre and its Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarisation, alienation). An earlier influence was friend Gershom Scholem, founder of the academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism. Influenced by the Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87), Benjamin coined the term ‘auratic perception', denoting the aesthetic faculty by means of which civilization may recover an appreciation of myth. Benjamin's work is often cited in academic and literary studies, especially the essays ‘The Task of the Translator' (1923) and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction‘ (1936). Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the Nazis.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________