The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin

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Edited by David Ferris

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published April 2004, 264 pages, paper

ISBN 0521797241

This Companion offers a comprehensive introduction to the work and thought of Walter Benjamin. The volume provides examinations of the different aspects of Benjamin's work that have had a significant effect on contemporary critical and historical thought. Topics discussed by experts in the field include Benjamin's relation to the avant-garde movements of his time, the form of the work of art, his theories on language and mimesis, modernity, his relation to Brecht and the Frankfurt School, his significance and relevance to modern cultural studies, his formative interpretation of Romanticism, and his autobiographical writings. Additional material includes a guide to further reading and a chronology.

 Contents

List of short titles and abbreviations
Walter Benjamin: a chronology
Introduction: Reading Benjamin -- David S. Ferris
1. Walter Benjamin and the European avant-garde -- Michael Jennings
2. Art forms -- Jan Mieszkowski
3. Language and mimesis in the work of Walter Benjamin -- Beatrice Hanssen
4. Walter Benjamin's concept of cultural history -- Howard Caygill
5. Benjamin's Modernity -- Andrew Benjamin
6. Benjamin and psychoanalysis -- Sarah Ley Roff
7. Ghostly medium: Romanticism and its possibilities -- Rebecca Comay
8. Body politics: dialectical materialism between Brecht and the Frankfurt School -- Rainer Nagele
9. Method and time: Benjamin's dialectical images -- Max Penksy
10. Benjamin's phantasmagoria: The Arcades -- Margaret Cohen
11. Acts of self-portraiture: Benjamin's confessional and literary writings -- Gerhard Richter
Guide to further reading.