Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of ModernityAndrew Benjamin, Charles Rice Walter Benjamin is universally recognised as one of the key thinkers of modernity: his writings on politics, language, literature, media, theology and law have had an incalculable influence on contemporary thought. Yet the problem of architecture in and for Benjamin's work remains relatively underexamined. Does Benjamin's project have an architecture and, if so, how does this architecture affect the explicit propositions that he offers us? In what ways are Benjamin's writings centrally caught up with architectural concerns, from the redevelopment of major urban centres to the movements that individuals can make within the new spaces of modern cities? How can Benjamin's theses help us to understand the secret architectures of the present? This volume takes up the architectural challenge in a number of innovative ways, collecting essays by both well-known and emerging scholars on time in cinema, the problem of kitsch, the design of graves and tombs, the orders of road-signs, childhood experience in modern cities, and much more. Engaged, interdisciplinary, bristling with insights, the essays in this collection will constitute an indispensable supplement to the work of Walter Benjamin, as well as providing a guide to some of the obscurities of our own present. |
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Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity Andrew E. Benjamin,Charles Rice No preview available - 2009 |
Common terms and phrases
19th century adult aesthetic Agamben analysis Arcades Project architecture argues artwork aura autonomy Bai Ling baroque Baudelaire become Benjamin says Benjamin writes Benjamin's Critique Berlin bourgeois bourgeois interior Carl Schmitt child childhood Chow collective colour concept context criticism Critique of Violence cultural deconstruction Derrida dialectical distinction Empfindung ence epic theatre Erfahrung essay experience film flâneur German Gilloch Goethe GS II·1 Hong Kong human intriguer jamin Kafka's kitsch Kracauer means memory messianic modernity Moscow mourning play mystical myth mythic nature notion Novalis object observation painting past perception philosophy political possibility potential prelapsarian present profane proletarian proletarian general strike Proust pure violence question radical reading realisation redemption relation relationship revolutionary Riegl rience romantic romanticism Schmitt sense significance social space teleology temporal theology theory things tion tradition transformation translation Trauerspiel understanding Walter Benjamin Werner Hamacher Wong Wong Kar-wai