{"title":"Books by Walter Benjamin","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780141036199","title":"Great Ideas the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction","description":"One of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, Walter Benjamin's groundbreaking essay explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeatedly – and what the troubling social and political implications of this are.\u003cp\u003eThroughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56224212320629,"sku":"9780141036199","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780141036199_5cccc2e5-851e-4e3c-800a-cd481625b148.jpg?v=1786011744"},{"product_id":"9780141189475","title":"One-Way Street and Other Writings","description":"\u003cp\u003eWalter Benjamin - philosopher, essayist, literary and cultural theorist - was one of the most original writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. This new selection brings together Benjamin's major works, including 'One-Way Street', his dreamlike, aphoristic observations of urban life in Weimar Germany; 'Unpacking My Library', a delightful meditation on book-collecting; the confessional 'Hashish in Marseille'; and 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', his seminal essay on how technology changes the way we appreciate art. Also including writings on subjects ranging from Proust to Kafka, violence to surrealism, this is the essential volume on one of the most prescient critical voices of the modern age. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eContains: 'Unpacking My Library'; 'One-Way Street'; 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'; 'Brief History of Photography'; 'Hashish in Marseille'; 'On the Critique of Violence'; 'The Job of the Translator'; 'Surrealism'; 'Franz Kafka' and 'Picturing Proust'.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56224393593205,"sku":"9780141189475","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780141189475_6ce7371a-0feb-4f62-a90f-1736fb2e6373.jpg?v=1786011586"},{"product_id":"9780241747261","title":"Unpacking My Library","description":"\u003cb\u003e90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e‘Every sort of passion verges on chaos, I know, but what the collecting passion verges on is a chaos of memories.’\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom intimate musings on his book collection, to a dream-like trip through the bustling streets of Marseille, each of these essays offers a compelling journey into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s most influential philosophers.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56230354223477,"sku":"9780241747261","price":5.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780241747261_6b2b52e6-466f-4405-821c-1bef62e07f63.jpg?v=1786012255"},{"product_id":"9780674019812","title":"Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 3: 1935–1938","description":"Radical critic of a European civilization plunging into darkness, yet commemorator of the humane traditions of the old bourgeoisie--such was Walter Benjamin in the later 1930s. This volume, the third in a four-volume set, offers twenty-seven brilliant pieces, nineteen of which have never before been translated.   The centerpiece, A Berlin Childhood around 1900, marks the first appearance in English of one of the greatest German works of the twentieth century: a profound and beautiful account of the vanished world of Benjamin's privileged boyhood, recollected in exile. No less remarkable are the previously untranslated second version of Benjamin's most famous essay, \"The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,\" with its striking insights into the relations between technology and aesthetics, and German Men and Women, a book in which Benjamin collects twenty-six letters by distinguished Germans from 1783 to 1883 in an effort to preserve what he called the true humanity of German tradition from the debasement of fascism.   Volume 3 also offers extensively annotated translations of essays that are key to Benjamin's rewriting of the story of modernism and modernity--such as \"The Storyteller\" and \"Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century\"--as well as a fascinating diary from 1938 and penetrating studies of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, and Eduard Fuchs. A narrative chronology details Benjamin's life during these four harrowing years of his exile in France and Denmark. This is an essential collection for anyone interested in his work.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56292610572661,"sku":"9780674019812","price":28.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674019812_4d265b66-90a5-4ff9-ad32-69e4f1b4ac1b.jpg?v=1786014997"},{"product_id":"9780674022294","title":"Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 4: 1938–1940","description":"\"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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56292798857589,"sku":"9780674022294","price":26.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674022294_6db49c75-07e1-4e80-b0e1-e166a44a301b.jpg?v=1786015000"},{"product_id":"9780674022225","title":"Berlin Childhood Around 1900","description":"Begun in Poveromo, Italy, in 1932, and extensively revised in 1938, Berlin Childhood around 1900 remained unpublished during Walter Benjamin’s lifetime, one of his “large-scale defeats.” Now translated into English for the first time in book form, on the basis of the recently discovered “final version” that contains the author’s own arrangement of a suite of luminous vignettes, it can be more widely appreciated as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century prose writing.   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 becomes an occasion for unified “expeditions into the depths of memory.” In this diagram of his life, Benjamin focuses not on persons or events but on places and things, all seen from the perspective of a child—a collector, flâneur, and allegorist in one. This book is also one of Benjamin’s great city texts, bringing to life the cocoon of his childhood—the parks, streets, schoolrooms, and interiors of an emerging metropolis. It reads the city as palimpsest and labyrinth, revealing unexpected lyricism in the heart of the familiar.   As an added gem, a preface by Howard Eiland discusses the genesis and structure of the work, which marks the culmination of Benjamin’s attempt to do philosophy concretely.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56293577720181,"sku":"9780674022225","price":18.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674022225_55298645-4d4e-453e-ac92-77cbdd7128b2.jpg?v=1786014998"},{"product_id":"9780674052291","title":"One–Way Street","description":"One-Way Street is a thoroughfare unlike anything else in literature—by turns exhilarating and bewildering, requiring mental agility and a special kind of urban literacy. Presented here in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a vein that anticipates later masterpieces such as “On the Concept of History” and The Arcades Project.   Composed of sixty short prose pieces that vary wildly in style and theme, One-Way Street evokes a dense cityscape of shops, cafes, and apartments, alive with the hubbub of social interactions and papered over with public inscriptions of all kinds: advertisements, signs, posters, slogans. Benjamin avoids all semblance of linear narrative, enticing readers with a seemingly random sequence of aphorisms, reminiscences, jokes, off-the-cuff observations, dreamlike fantasias, serious philosophical inquiries, apparently unserious philosophical parodies, and trenchant political commentaries. Providing remarkable insight into the occluded meanings of everyday things, Benjamin time and again proves himself the unrivalled interpreter of what he called “the soul of the commodity.”Despite the diversity of its individual sections, Benjamin’s text is far from formless. Drawing on the avant-garde aesthetics of Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism, its unusual construction implies a practice of reading that cannot be reduced to simple formulas. Still refractory, still radical, One-Way Street is a work in perpetual progress.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294049677685,"sku":"9780674052291","price":15.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674052291_5acfee8c-befc-4dde-9e44-be7aeb7becab.jpg?v=1786015045"},{"product_id":"9780674013551","title":"Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1: 1913–1926","description":"Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and important critical voices of the twentieth century, but until now only a few of his writings have been available in English. Harvard University Press has now undertaken to publish a significant portion of his work in definitive translation, under the general editorship of Michael W. Jennings. This volume, the first of three, will at last give readers of English a true sense of the man and the many facets of his thought. (The magnum opus of Benjamin’s Paris years, The Arcades Project, has been published in a separate volume.)Walter Benjamin emerged from the head-on collision of an idealistic youth movement and the First World War, which Benjamin and his close friends thought immoral. He walked away from the wreck scarred yet determined “to be considered as the principal critic of German literature.” But the scene, as he found it, was dominated by “talented fakes,” so—to use his words—“only a terrorist campaign would I suffice” to effect radical change. This book offers the record of the first phase of that campaign, culminating with “One Way Street,” one of the most significant products of the German avant-garde of the Twenties. Against conformism, homogeneity, and gentrification of all life into a new world order, Benjamin made the word his sword.   Volume I of the Selected Writings brings together essays long and short, academic treatises, reviews, fragments, and privately circulated pronouncements. Fully five-sixths of this material has never before been translated into English. The contents begin in 1913, when Benjamin, as an undergraduate in imperial Germany, was president of a radical youth group, and take us through 1926, when he had already begun, with his explorations of the world of mass culture, to emerge as a critical voice in Weimar Germany’s most influential journals.   The volume includes a number of his most important works, including “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin,” “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” “The Task of the Translator,” and “One Way Street.” He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children’s books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as the philosophy of language, symbolic logic, or epistemology. We meet Benjamin the youthful idealist, the sober moralist, the political theorist, the experimentalist, the translator, and, above all, the virtual king of criticism, with his magisterial exposition of the basic problems of aesthetics.   Benjamin’s sentences provoke us to return to them again and again, luring us as though with the promise of some final revelation that is always being postponed. He is by turns fierce and tender, melancholy and ebullient; he is at once classically rooted, even archaic, in his explorations of the human psyche and the world of things, and strikingly progressive in his attitude toward society and what he likes to call the organs of the collective (its architectures, fashions, signboards). Throughout, he displays a far-sighted urgency, judging the present on the basis of possible futures. And he is gifted with a keen sense of humor. Mysterious though he may sometimes be (his Latvian love, Asia Lacis, once described him as a visitor from another planet), Benjamin remains perhaps the most consistently surprising and challenging of critical writers.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294050759029,"sku":"9780674013551","price":28.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674013551_cba830fe-a498-490f-84e4-9aa22b8bf8e4.jpg?v=1786014979"},{"product_id":"9780674024458","title":"The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media","description":"Walter Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general—in their most realized form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of everyone who reads it. In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought.   This essay, however, is only the beginning of a vast collection of writings that the editors have assembled to demonstrate what was revolutionary about Benjamin’s explorations on media. Long before Marshall McLuhan, Benjamin saw that the way a bullet rips into its victim is exactly the way a movie or pop song lodges in the soul.   This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the “Work of Art” essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks Benjamin’s observations on the media as they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and painting. The volume contains some of Benjamin’s best-known work alongside fascinating, little-known essays—some appearing for the first time in English. In the context of his passionate engagement with questions of aesthetics, the scope of Benjamin’s media theory can be fully appreciated.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294071206261,"sku":"9780674024458","price":19.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674024458_acb996d9-8124-48be-b473-d7ca3c310444.jpg?v=1786032758"},{"product_id":"9780804749534","title":"Toward the Critique of Violence","description":"\u003cp\u003eMarking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, \"Toward the Critique of Violence,\" this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's \u003ci\u003eReflections on Violence\u003c\/i\u003e further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWith its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294826180981,"sku":"9780804749534","price":21.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780804749534_43d85c29-ee73-48a3-9637-0295a504a75f.jpg?v=1786015619"},{"product_id":"9781681370583","title":"The Storyteller Essays","description":"\u003cb\u003eA new translation of philosopher Walter Benjamin's work as it pertains to his famous essay, \"The Storyteller,\" this collection includes short stories, book reviews, parables, and as a selection of writings by other authors who had an influence on Benjamin's work.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “The Storyteller” is one of Walter Benjamin’s most important essays, a beautiful and suggestive meditation on the relation between narrative form, social life, and individual existence—and the product of at least a decade’s work. What might be called the story of \u003ci\u003eThe Storyteller Essays\u003c\/i\u003e starts in 1926, with a piece Benjamin wrote about the German romantic Johann Peter Hebel. It continues in a series of short essays, book reviews, short stories, parables, and even radio shows for children. This collection brings them all together to give readers a new appreciation of how Benjamin’s thinking changed and ripened over time, while including several key readings of his own—texts by his contemporaries Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács; by Paul Valéry; and by Herodotus and Montaigne. Finally, to bring things around, there are three short stories by “the incomparable Hebel” with whom the whole intellectual adventure began.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303696380277,"sku":"9781681370583","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781681370583_590e21ae-6217-4387-b5cd-adb1955e8557.jpg?v=1786024500"},{"product_id":"9781788738583","title":"Aesthetics and Politics","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn intense and lively debate on literature and art between thinkers who became some of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy and literature.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWith an afterword by Fredric Jameson\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In \u003ci\u003eAesthetics and Politics\u003c\/i\u003e the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56305836818805,"sku":"9781788738583","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781788738583_37b2d29e-f91c-4561-9fee-7102d7298058.jpg?v=1786027054"},{"product_id":"9781804290415","title":"The Storyteller","description":"\u003cb\u003eA beautiful collection of the legendary thinker’s short stories\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Storyteller\u003c\/i\u003e gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including \u003ci\u003eIlluminations\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eOne-Way Street\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Arcades Project\u003c\/i\u003e. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin. The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56306928812405,"sku":"9781804290415","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781804290415_4c0c10e8-8051-47bc-bbbb-cbead2c074fa.jpg?v=1786026686"},{"product_id":"9781804290453","title":"Charles Baudelaire","description":"\u003cb\u003eA classic account of late nineteenth-century Paris and a study of Baudelaire's life and work\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWalter Benjamin, one of the foremost cultural commentators and theorists of this century, is perhaps best known for his analyses of the work of art in the modern age and the philosophy of history.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet it was through his study of the social and cultural history of the late nineteenth-century Paris, examined particularly in relation to the figure of the great Parisian lyric poet Charles Baudelaire, that Benjamin tested and enriched some of his core concepts and themes. Contained within these pages are, amongst other insights, his notion of the \u003ci\u003eflaneur,\u003c\/i\u003e his theory of memory and remembrance, his assessment of the utopian Fourier and his reading of the modernist movement.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56306928976245,"sku":"9781804290453","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781804290453_cf790f30-fbe8-400f-ab24-0abbe61312f4.jpg?v=1786026689"},{"product_id":"9781804290460","title":"The Origin of German Tragic Drama","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Origin of German Tragic Drama\u003c\/i\u003e is Walter Benjamin\u0026amp;rsquo;s most sustained and original work.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGeorg Lukacs, an opponent of Benjamin\u0026amp;rsquo;s aesthetics, singled out \u003ci\u003eThe Origin of German Tragic Drama\u003c\/i\u003e as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56307570704757,"sku":"9781804290460","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781804290460_7258c0dc-1eed-4b01-8b2b-6344993750f5.jpg?v=1786026690"},{"product_id":"9781839761652","title":"One-Way Street","description":"\u003cb\u003eA classic collection of Walter Benjamin's essays, including some of his most celebrated writing\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWalter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic intellectual figures of this century. Not only was he a thinker who made an enormous impact with his critical and philosophical writings, he shattered disciplinary and stylistic conventions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis collection, introduced by Susan Sontag, contains the most representative and illuminating selection of his work over a twenty-year period, and thus does full justice to the richness and the multi-dimensional nature of his thought. Included in these pages are aphorisms and townscapes, esoteric meditation and reminiscences of childhood, and reflections on language, psychology, aesthetics and politics.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56307899793781,"sku":"9781839761652","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781839761652_3cf8231d-06e0-4313-85a9-933663970c4d.jpg?v=1786027788"},{"product_id":"9781839764165","title":"Radio Benjamin","description":"\u003cp\u003eWalter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to ’33, he wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio. \u003ci\u003eRadio Benjamin\u003c\/i\u003e gathers the surviving transcripts, which appear here for the first time in English. This eclectic collection demonstrates the range of Benjamin’s thinking and his enthusiasm for popular sensibilities. His celebrated “Enlightenment for Children” youth programs, his plays, readings, book reviews, and fiction reveal Benjamin in a creative, rather than critical, mode. They flesh out ideas elucidated in his essays, some of which are also represented here, where they cover topics as varied as getting a raise and the history of natural disasters, subjects chosen for broad appeal and examined with passion and acuity.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDelightful and incisive, this is Walter Benjamin channeling his sophisticated thinking to a wide audience, allowing us to benefit from a new voice for one of the twentieth century’s most respected thinkers.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308019462517,"sku":"9781839764165","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781839764165_71e29bbf-67f8-466f-8a35-e32f7b7f364d.jpg?v=1786027830"},{"product_id":"9781847923868","title":"Illuminations","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eIlluminations\u003c\/i\u003e contains the most celebrated work of Walter Benjamin, one of the most original and influential thinkers of the 20th Century: \u003c\/b\u003e'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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308331217269,"sku":"9781847923868","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781847923868_68c445bc-88ac-4cbc-91db-1d927a3c75b0.jpg?v=1786029136"},{"product_id":"9781912475841","title":"Unpacking My Library","description":"\"I fully realize that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type. Nothing is further from my mind than to shake either your conviction or your distrust.\" Walter Benjamin was one of the great cultural critics of the twentieth century. In Unpacking My Library he offers a strikingly personal meditation on his career as a book collector and on the strange relations that spring up between objects and their owners. Witty, erudite and often moving, this book will resonate with bibliophiles of all kinds.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308603748725,"sku":"9781912475841","price":6.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781912475841_3fd47612-045a-4efe-b331-654bca29c4cf.jpg?v=1786030325"},{"product_id":"9780674017467","title":"Walter Benjamin – Selected Writings V 2 Part 2 – 1931–1934","description":"In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts.   In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, \"Surrealism\" and \"On the Image of Proust,\" as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers. Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, \"Franz Kafka,\" \"Karl Kraus,\" and \"The Author as Producer,\" the extended autobiographical meditation \"A Berlin Chronicle,\" and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56311840801141,"sku":"9780674017467","price":28.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674017467_de41330f-7461-491f-a15b-06e307206558.jpg?v=1786014989"},{"product_id":"9780674015883","title":"Walter Benjamin – Selected Writings V 2 Part 1 – 1927–1930","description":"In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts.   In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, \"Surrealism\" and \"On the Image of Proust,\" as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers. Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, \"Franz Kafka,\" \"Karl Kraus,\" and \"The Author as Producer,\" the extended autobiographical meditation \"A Berlin Chronicle,\" and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56311840833909,"sku":"9780674015883","price":28.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674015883_760fccbf-a408-439d-9538-f6b814aa0534.jpg?v=1792422813"},{"product_id":"9780674744240","title":"Origin of the German Trauerspiel","description":"Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin’s first full, historically oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English know it as “The Origin of German Tragic Drama,” but in fact the subject is something else—the play of mourning. Howard Eiland’s completely new English translation, the first since 1977, is closer to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin’s philosophical idiom.   Focusing on the extravagant seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory as the constitutive trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays—though no less haunted and bedeviled. History as trauerspiel is the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal.   Benjamin’s investigation of the trauerspiel includes German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Hamlet and Calderón’s Life Is a Dream. The prologue is one of his most important and difficult pieces of writing. It lays out his method of indirection and his idea of the “constellation” as a key means of grasping the world, making dynamic unities out of the myriad bits of daily life. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary material, this rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary critics.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56311844438389,"sku":"9780674744240","price":18.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674744240_186febae-8a12-44c9-a380-ed7b77a7afd4.jpg?v=1786014857"},{"product_id":"9781503642225","title":"On Goethe","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eOn Goethe\u003c\/i\u003e contains the full range of Walter Benjamin's reflections on the central figure in modern German culture. The writings in this volume—newly translated, fully annotated, and framed by an extensive introduction—display a variety of styles and cover a vast array of topics. The collection revolves around two strikingly different essays. Whereas \"Goethe's \u003ci\u003eElective Affinities\u003c\/i\u003e\" develops a theory of critique in which a work is illuminated wholly from within itself, an article Benjamin wrote on Goethe for the Soviet Encyclopedia represents his first large-scale attempt to elaborate a historical-materialist methodology. The other thirty translations stand in similarly productive tension with one another. Some are concerned with concepts of beauty and categories of the aesthetic, others with the relation of art to politics and the status of \"classical authors\" in contemporary culture, and still others with what remains of humanistic traditions in the wake of their disappearance under fascist regimes and what synthesis is required for the construction of a historical object. The volume provides a glimpse into the laboratory of Benjamin's thought, while granting readers a series of insights into the epochal phenomena that gather around the name \"Goethe.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312497340789,"sku":"9781503642225","price":23.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781503642225_b809caeb-8387-4e53-b887-d747d9829586.jpg?v=1786021957"},{"product_id":"9781780235257","title":"On Photography","description":"Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘A Short History of Photography’ (1931) made bold statements about photographic pioneers such as David Octavius Hill and Nicéphore Niépce, and the social and historical context of their work. This first selection of Benjamin’s writings on photography includes a new translation of this influential essay as well as a range of Benjamin’s other writings, both published and unpublished, some of which are translated into English for the first time here.   Esther Leslie’s introduction covers Benjamin’s writing on early photographic methods and aesthetics; his analysis of the commercial studio photography of the ‘decadent’ bourgeoisie; the use of photographs in scientific research; and other innovative photographic methods such as the ‘auraless’ images of Eugène Atget and the ‘new visions’ of August Sander and Germaine Krull. Leslie discusses Benjamin’s take on the evolution of photography into a modern form, the universal fascination with the seemingly simple postcard – an interest dating back to Benjamin’s own childhood – as well as the special relationship he found between Paris and the photographic method.   As a notable philosopher, critic and uniquely imaginative thinker, Benjamin’s essays offer a fascinating critique of early photography. With a substantial introduction, contextualizing prefaces and comprehensive glossaries, Esther Leslie guides the reader through Walter Benjamin’s multifaceted engagement with the significance of photography.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312797626741,"sku":"9781780235257","price":16.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781780235257_d7ed525a-d0fd-4205-b109-a100b49c0cf2.jpg?v=1786024369"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-walter-benjamin.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}