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Cargando... Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (1978)por Walter Benjamin
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. We can remark in passing that there is no better starting point for thought than laughter. In particular, thought usually has a better chance when one is shaken by laughter than when one’s mind is shaken and upset. The only extravagance of the epic theatre is its amount of laughter. This is a much more disparate collection than Illuminations. Surely this is to be expected The isfting and editing. The indecision. Reflections' opening section A Berlin Chronicle is a cartographic autobiography. It is a spatial narrative in the weirdest sense. There is a disorientation present. I also liked the Conversations With Brecht and the Author as Producer though my attentions waned upon approaching the lengthy piece on Karl Kraus. The concluding fragments appear rich with insight but frankly I was spent by that time. There are certain essays in here ("Critique of Violence," for example) that are solid fives. Demetz's introduction, with some modification/caveats, and whether for good or ill, pinpoints a large part of what draws me to Benjamin: "his philosophy, sustained by utter loneliness, rather than by the concerns of the masses, particularly attracts those intellectuals who restlessly search for a better world and yet shy away from the grubbbier commitments of a practical kind." his is much tougher than Illuminations. Especially "Critique of Violence" about the establishment of law. Especially the essays that evolve to the messiah. "I tell myself it had to be in Paris, where the walls and quays, the places to pause, the collections and the rubbish, the railings and the squares, the arcades and the kiosks, teach a language so singular that our relations to people attain, in the solitude accompanying us in our immersion in that world of things, the depths of a sleep in which the dream image waits to show the people their true faces. I wish to write of this afternoon because it made so apparent what kind of regimen cities keep over imagination, and why the city, where people make the most ruthless demands on one another, and where appointments and telephone calls, sessions and visits, flirtations and the struggle for existence grant the individual not a single moment of contemplation, indemnifies itself in memory, and why the veil it has covertly woven out of our lives shows the images of people less than those of the sites of our encounters with others or ourselves." sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin's writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin. He moves seamlessly from literary criticism to autobiography to philosophical-theological speculations, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest and most versatile writers of the twentieth century. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)834.912Literature German literature and literatures of related languages German essays Modern period (1900-) 20th Century 1900-1945Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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The latter half of the book is filled with a lot of pseudophilosophy that I found it harder to connect with. It seems like a lot of these writings may have been pulled of journals and diaries. Anyone who writes knows that the stuff you write in your private notebooks might be inscrutable to others - while writing to yourself, you use a kind of shorthand, tracing invisible, sketchy lines between ideas that seem clear to you, but would look like a tangled mess to anyone who doesn’t understand the internal logic. I often felt like these pieces were Benjamin talking to himself - long, dense sentences filled with ideas and details that needed to be unpacked and slowed down if I was to get any clarity from them. Maybe I’m just not the intended audience, or maybe I just don’t have the intellectual background, but I feel like Benjamin is a much more interesting writer when he’s aiming at more down to earth topics. ( )